A Measurement Based Model for Assessment of User Centered Design Level for Open Source Software Projects

For a long time, free and open source software (F/OSS) developers tend to build feature-centric projects rather than following a user centred design, ignoring the necessity of usability inside the resulting product. While there are many reasons behind this, main cause can be stated as the lack of awareness of usability from developersʹ point of view and little interaction of project stakeholders with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies. In order to increase the usability hence the competitiveness of open source software applications, developers need to measure their usability activities within the project, therefore conduct appropriate user centered design methodologies. In this paper, a measurement method is proposed based on the motivation to improve the usability of applications and increase the efficiency of communication and collaboration level of HCI experts and developers.