Putting a Face to the Issue: Fostering User Empathy of Open Source Software Developers With PersonaFlow
Boniface Bahati Tadjuidje, Jin L. C. Guo, Jinghui Cheng
TLDR
PersonaFlow helps open-source developers foster user empathy by generating and integrating user personas directly into issue trackers.
Key contributions
- PersonaFlow generates editable user personas from OSS repository artifacts.
- Integrates these personas alongside issue reports to provide user context.
- User study showed developers improved user understanding and empathetic responses.
- Personas fostered empathy through emotional connection or pragmatic triaging.
Why it matters
Open-source developers often struggle to grasp user context, leading to less user-centered solutions. PersonaFlow addresses this by making user personas accessible within existing workflows. This can significantly improve developer empathy and lead to more user-centric software development.
Original Abstract
Open-source software (OSS) developers often struggle to understand and respond to user context, while existing tools, such as issue trackers (for handling bugs, requests, and feedback), largely focus on technical discussion. Although personas could help, limited resources and UX expertise make them hard to scale. We present PersonaFlow, a tool that generates editable user personas from OSS repository artifacts and integrates them alongside issue reports. In a user study with 13 OSS developers, most reported shifts in how they understood users, and more than half modified their responses by adding empathetic language, tailoring explanations, or raising priority ratings. We found two pathways to this change: some connected emotionally to personas as people, while others used them pragmatically for triaging. Both appeared to lead to more user-centered behavior. We contribute design implications for persona-based tools relevant to OSS and other contexts where efficiency-driven systems or workflows obscure valuable human elements.
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