Information Technology Reference
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Over the last 20 years, we have seen an abun-
dance of literature on how usability can be used
to leverage the return of investment, increase end
user satisfaction and lower the training budget.
Setting interface standards, providing usability
requirements before a software project begins,
heuristic evaluations and usability tests have been
conducted in order to evaluate and improve an
application or a series of web pages in order to
increase the performance of the end user.
On the other hand, little attention has been paid
to the usability of end user applications in F/OSS
projects, although it is widely acknowledged as
a success factor of desktop applications devel-
oped on the Internet. Lack of common usability
design guidelines and methods of communication
between usability experts and F/OSS developers
resulted in F/OSS software with relatively low
level of usability. While there are counterex-
amples of this, it's worth investigating the main
factors of lack of F/OSS application usability and
concentrate on how to improve the user centric
design experience of voluntary projects, since us-
ability can be integrated into current open source
development processes.
As such, F/OSS usability is an important
phenomenon deserving a study in itself. User
centric design has not been the first priority of
open source projects developed by people geo-
graphically distributed in all parts of the world.
Thus, it can be argued that usability awareness
and representation has been neglected for a long
time. Traditionally, F/OSS has been successful in
server products (Apache, MySQL, etc), libraries
and compilers (GNU C compiler, Glibc, Qt, GTK)
and console-based applications (bash shell, pine,
etc). These applications were used by experienced
people in specific organizations like universi-
ties and research institutes and those who have
used them demanded less training and usability
criteria. Most of the users of these applications
are relatively technically sophisticated and the
average desktop user is using standard commercial
proprietary software (Lerner and Tirole, 2002).
Lack of clear usability requirements, awareness
of user-centered design and a social collabora-
tive tool to discuss usability issues usually result
in a poor evaluation for F/OSS products. This
is problem in ergonomic design and interface
psychology, and hackers have historically been
poor at it (Raymond, 1999). As F/OSS matures
and enterprises start using F/OSS, it entered the
mainstream area and enterprises started to demand
not only reliability, security and efficiency, but
usability, ergonomics and ease of use. As a result,
in order to answer the demand from customers,
some open source projects have tried to adopt
techniques from previous proprietary work,
such as explicit user interface guidelines for ap-
plication developers (Benson, Adam, Nickell &
Robertson, 2002).
On the other hand, there's a scarcity of pub-
lished usability studies and test reports of F/
OSS from academics. We are aware of studies
on GNOME (Smith, et. al., 2001), Greenstone
(Nichols, Thomson, Kirsten & Yeates, 2001), file
browser screening test (Reitmayr, 2007), Linux
desktop out of box experience (Göktürk & Çetin,
2007) and OpenOffice.org usability test (Çetin,
Verzulli & Frings, 2006), to name a few. While
there is little formal research on F/OSS usability,
developers are well aware that F/OSS usability is
a problem that should be solved and usability is a
significant issue of unsuccessful F/OSS projects.
According to Müehling (2004), “it becomes clear
that F/OSS projects have a fundamental problem:
they lack usability resources that help achieve
better usable software for non-geek users”.
Issues stemming from development paths af-
fect the usability process of open source projects.
Lack of developers also indirectly means lack of
usability experts. Hierarchical models in which
main decisions are taken by lead (core) developers
with a lack of user interface design background
affect the usability centeredness of F/OSS projects,
hence the usability of the product. A developer
working in a F/OSS project should have explicit
rights and title, together with a strong technical
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