Untold Stories: Unveiling the Scarce Contributions of UX Professionals to Usability Issue Discussions of Open Source Software Projects

2025-02-24

AI Summary

In open-source software (OSS) projects, insufficient participation of UX professionals in usability-related issue discussions hinders user-centered design practices. This study presents the first systematic identification and comparative discourse analysis of UX contributors’ versus developers’ linguistic patterns across issues in multiple GitHub-hosted OSS projects, employing qualitative coding and critical discourse analysis. Results indicate that UX contributors address a broader spectrum of usability issues, employ more evidence-based and neutral argumentation, prioritize clarification and collaborative interaction, and demonstrate greater initiative in issue follow-up. These findings reveal the distinct value proposition of the UX role within OSS governance—emphasizing facilitation, user advocacy, and methodological rigor—and inform concrete pathways for institutionalizing UX involvement. The work provides empirical grounding and methodological guidance for enhancing OSS usability and end-user satisfaction.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis

Abstract

Previous work established that open source software (OSS) projects can benefit from the involvement of UX professionals, who offer user-centric perspectives and contributions to improve software usability. However, their participation in OSS issue discussions (places where design and implementation decisions are often made) is relatively scarce since those platforms are created with a developer-centric mindset. Analyzing a dataset sampled from five OSS projects, this study identifies UX professionals' distinct approaches to raising and following up on usability issues. Compared to other contributors, UX professionals addressed a broader range of usability issues, well-supported their stances, and were more factual than emotional. They also actively engage in discussions to provide additional insights and clarifications in comments following up on the issues they posted. Results from this study provide useful insights for increasing UX professionals' involvement in OSS communities to improve usability and end-user satisfaction.

Problem

• UX professionals' limited OSS participation
• Developer-centric OSS issue discussions
• Improving usability through UX involvement

Innovation

• UX professionals' distinct approaches
• broader range usability issues
• active engagement in discussions