OPTIMIZING THE DESIGN FOR USER EXPERIENCES IN DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES OF DESKTOP-BASED FREE AND OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECTS
| dc.contributor.author | NAMAYALA, PHESTO PETER | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-10T05:57:22Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023-10 | |
| dc.description | This article was publish by Taylor and Francis in 2023 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The popularity of User Experience (UX) is exponentially increasing in every organization, including the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. It is often the predictor of success as it assists in developing products that meet users’ requirements. Although stakeholders in the FOSS community are beginning to realize the values of UX and gain a shared understanding, many FOSS projects do not value UX and inconsistently incorporate related activities in their strategic plans, causing them to have undesirable UX, being complex to use and poorly adopted. Although server-based FOSS applications enjoy a significant market share, desktop- based applications are not well-performing compared to their counterpart proprietary software, mainly due to poor UX. Although examples of desktop-based FOSS projects with desirable UX exist, such as Mozilla Firefox and Emacs, there is still potential to improve many others by enhancing processes for incorporating UX- related tasks. UX is an organizational endeavor and demands the entire organization’s efforts. As a result, its assessment must check the organization’s strength to carry out UX-related operations. However, little research exists on the UX assessment of FOSS projects. The fundamental contribution of this thesis is a model entitled the Free and Open Source Software User Experience Maturity Model (FOSS-UXMM) that measures organizational strengths and weaknesses in implementing UX-related activities. The model addresses the need to quantify how much FOSS initiatives support UX and propose initiatives to enhance UX aspects in the development life cycles of desktop- based FOSS projects. The FOSS-UXMM mainly investigates the association between FOSS project UX maturity and UX maturity impacting factors. Its measuring instrument comprises factors from a completed literature review and experts’ options collected using the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM). Before establishing the factors influencing the FOSS community’s UX maturity that has been adopted to develop FOSS-UXMM, the study examined the applicability of present User Experience Capability Maturity Models (UXCMMs) in the FOSS community and identified ten lenses for measuring the FOSS community’s preparation to achieve higher levels of UX maturity. It also completed two case studies to validate and verify the proposed FOSS-UXMM. Finally, the FOSS-UXMM was appraised by comparing it with the selected UXCMMs. The findings indicate that the FOSS-UXMM is ideal and superior for assessing the UX maturity of the FOSS community because it contains FOSS- exclusive UX maturity influencing factors established by involving the right key stakeholders, it is tested with the the actual projects and provides desirable and consistent results. | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | MUST | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://repository.must.ac.tz/handle/123456789/648 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Taylor and Francis | |
| dc.subject | DESKTOP-BASED FREE OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECTS | |
| dc.title | OPTIMIZING THE DESIGN FOR USER EXPERIENCES IN DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES OF DESKTOP-BASED FREE AND OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECTS | |
| dc.type | Article |