Assessing usability readiness of collaborative projects

It’s believed that free and open source software (F/OSS) developers are inclined to build feature-centric projects rather than following a user-centric design, ignoring the necessity of usability inside the resulting product. While there are many reasons behind this, main cause can be attributed to lack of awareness of usability from developers’ point of view and little interaction of project stakeholders with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies. In order to increase the usability and the competitiveness of open source software applications, developers need to measure their usability activities during the project, therefore they can conduct appropriate user centered design methodologies. In this paper, a measurement method and a corresponding application is developed based on the motivation to improve the usability of applications and to increase the efficiency of communication and collaboration level of HCI experts and developers.

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