Introducing Usability Practices to OSS: The Insiders ’ Experience

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a case study of introducing usability practices to a small open source project called Carrot 2. We describe our experiences from a point of view of an active Carrot 2 developer, who is at the same time a usability enthusiast and practitioner. We perform a critical analysis of the system’s original user interface and describe the steps we took to improve it. We also analyse the success factors and the impact of the whole redesign process.