Interactions - May/June 2010

allies, their skills are valued and
often sought after [ 4].
bug tracker, and data and results
from evaluations [ 7].

[ 4] Muehling, J., and
Reitmayr, E. “Integrating
Usability with Open
Source Soft ware
Development: Case
Studies from the
Initiative OpenUsability.”
In Proceedings of the
tOSSad Workshop
on Governmental,
Educational, Usability,
and Legal Issues
towards Open Source
Software Adoption in an
Enlarged Europe, 65,
Como, Italy, 2006.

the tools of open source

The nature of open source– software development is global and distributed. Project contributions occur via communication and coordination tools over the Internet. The tools of open source have been appropriated or developed by open source contributors, developers and users alike, to communicate about and coordinate their activities. Typically, open source project members use discussion forums, email, and IRC (inter-relay chat) to communicate, plus an online bug tracker such as Bugzilla and a source-code repository and versioning system such as SVN (subversion).

Some design discussions hap-
pen on mailing lists and discus-
sion forums, but no centralized
system for supporting design
activities yet exists [ 5]. Both
openoffice.org and Firefox push
user experience design informa-
tion to the community regularly
via a blog dedicated to planning
and current issues [ 6]. Some
mailing lists have used ASCII
art to mock up designs as well
as provide links to static image
designs. Links to such images
are also found in discussion
forums. However, this method of
communicating designs is inad-
equate. Research has proposed
design solutions to support user-
experience design activities in
open source contexts, including
a design workspace that includes
features such as a to-do list for
design work categorized for new-
bies or more experienced design
contributors, repositories and
work space for user research,
design-iteration space, comments
and links to related issues in the
environment and on open source
encapsulates the excitement of
the 21st century: innovating and
learning in communities of prac-
tice while producing meaningful
software. Social participation in
open source is the next step for
designers to change the world.

[ 5] Twidale, M.B., and Nichols, D. M. “Exploring Usability Discussions in Open Source Development.” In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HCICS‚ 05). Hawaii: IEEE Computer Press Society, 2005.

[ 6] Bach, P. M. and
Carroll, J.M. “FLOSS
UX design: An Analysis
of User Experience
Design in Firefox
and OpenOffice.
org.” In Open
Source Ecosystems:
Diverse Communities
Interacting, Ed.
Boldyreff, B., Crowston,
K., Lundell, B., and
Wasserman, A.I.
Boston: Springer, 2009.

About the Authors
Paula Bach is a UX
researcher at Microsoft.
Previously she was a post-
doctoral research associate
at The University of Illinois
[ 7] Bach, P.M., DeLine,
R. and Carroll, J.M.
“Designers Wanted:
Participation and the
User Experience in
Open Source Software
Development.” In
Proceedings of the CHI

May + June 2010

interactions
[ 8] Jenkins, H.,
Puroshotma, R.,
Clinton, K., Weigel,
M., and Robison,
A. J. “Confronting
the Challenges of
Participatory Culture:
Media Education for the
21st Century,” 2005,
available at http://www.
newmedialiteracies.
org/files/working/
NMLWhitePaper.pdf.
Retrieved on 6/22/2009.

designer-led open
source Projects
As a summary and generaliza-
tion of the benefits for designers
engaged in social participation
in open source, we’ll draw on
Jenkins et al. [ 8] as they define
participatory culture as one:
• With relatively low barriers
to artistic expression and civic
engagement
• With strong support for cre-
ating and sharing one’s creations
with others
• With some type of informal
mentorship whereby what is
known by the most experienced
is passed along to novices
• Where members believe that
their contributions matter
• Where members feel some
degree of social connection with
one another (at the least they
care what other people think
about what they have created).
Open source is a participatory
culture and one that offers mutu-
al benefits for designers.

As a parting thought, we’d like to propose a designer-led open source project. Designers would conceptualize this project—it might be to scratch an itch, to improve upon an existing tool, to test a concept, or to completely rethink a paradigmatic software product. An open source project initiated and run by designers would engender a different culture and community structure, one that put design thinking at the forefront. Design-sensitive developers could recognize the design-based merit system within the community and be willing to lend their coding skills to design-based open source projects. This new spin on the design

Michael Twidale is a Professor of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include computer supported cooperative work, computer supported collaborative learning, human computer interaction, information visualization, and museum informatics. Current projects include studies of informal social learning of technology, technological appropriation, collaborative approaches to managing data quality, the use of mashups to create lightweight applications, collaborative information retrieval, ubiquitous learning and the usability of open source software. His approach involves the use of interdisciplinary techniques to develop high-speed, low-cost methods to better understand the needs of people, and their difficulties with existing computer applications as part of the process of designing more effective systems.