The usability of OSF: Problems and solutions.
Camille Butera · 2018
The goal of this paper is to assess the usability of the OSF website. This assessment is relevant to the first goal of OSF which is to improve openness. OSF’s usability problems hinder an efficient search for open projects and data, and thus hinder the mission of OSF itself. I conducted a heuristic evaluation of OSF. A heuristic evaluation is a method of site evaluation which involves noting cases where the user complies or fails to comply with evidence-based usability principles. Typically, a small set of evaluators conduct the evaluation, but in this case I was the sole evaluator. The set of heuristics to be employed in this paper are from Gerhardt-Powals (1996), which were derived from Molich and Nielsen’s (1990) original heuristics. For this paper I will be focusing on heuristics which relate to the most severe problems. These heuristics are (a) using names conceptually related to function, (b) presenting new information with meaningful aids to interpretation, (c) grouping data in consistently meaningful ways, and (d) automating unwanted workload. This work was supported by National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1730262.