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Iivari, N., Rajanen, M., Hedberg, H. (2014)
Encouraging for Enculturation - An Enquiry on the Effort of Usability
Specialists Entering OSS Projects. In Proceedings of 25th
Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2014). Auckland,
New Zealand.
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Abstraxt
Open source software (OSS) has increased its importance during recent
years. The significance of OSS usability has been acknowledged; however,
usability work, albeit carried out, doesn't necessarily have any impact on
the OSS under development. This paper examines how the impact of usability
work can be increased in OSS projects. Through cross-case analysis, seven
OSS development cases including usability work were examined and
characteristics contributing to usability work having an impact
identified. The analysis indicates that for increasing the impact of
usability work, enculturation of usability specialists is important.
Enculturation happens naturally when usability specialists take part in
the project from the very beginning, but in OSS development this is
uncommon. Otherwise, usability specialists need to place extra effort on
enculturation, which in our data involved various kinds of practices
relating to 1) understanding the product under development, 2) finding
motivation for usability and 3) locating and targeting the
decision-makers.
Keywords
Usability, Open Source Software, Enculturation, Cross-case analysis
BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{iivari2014acis,
author = {Iivari, Netta and Rajanen, Mikko and Hedberg, Henrik},
title = {Encouraging for Enculturation--An Enquiry on the Effort of
Usability Specialists Entering OSS Projects},
year = {2014},
booktitle = {ACIS 2014: Proceedings of 25th Australasian Conference on
Information Systems (ACIS 2014)},
organization = {ACIS},
location = {Auckland, New Zealand},
keywords = {Usability, Open Source Software, Enculturation, Cross-case
analysis},
url =
{http://www.student.oulu.fi/~mrajanen/acis2014_iivari_rajanen_hedberg.pdf},
}
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