To Do or Not To Do: Usability in Open Source Development

During 2006 we launched a project that initially aimed at improving the usability of the Open Source Software (OSS) content management system TYPO3 (see box). The main aim of the project was to improve the user friendliness of a forthcoming iteration of the system by introducing usability concepts to the developer community. This proved to be quite a challenge and looking back we found three areas that prevented the inclusion of usability perspectives in the development process: the OSS community’s ‘culture of doing’, the OSS ideology, and finally our role as researchers which emphasised differences in understandings of praxis.