Hi,
On 22/02/11 15:40, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
for an interview I was asked if Free Software is less useable than non-free software. Do you have any good studies which I can include in the reply?
AFAIK
there's no academic study which *specifically* compares usability in proprietary software against Free Software.
Usually, that FS involve more usability problems than proprietary software is the assumption that is used to bring forward other specific research aims.
If you want to have a quick look at one of these ref. They are the ones that are most typically cited (I think you can easily find them through scholar.google.com):
Andreasen, M. S., Nielsen, H., Schroder, S., & Stage, J. (2006). Usability in open source software development: opinions and practice. Information technology and control, 25(3A), 303–12.
Nichols, D., & Twidale, M. (2003). The Usability of Open Source Software. First Monday, 8(1). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1018/...
Nichols, D. M., & Twidale, M. B. (2006). Usability processes in open source projects. Software Process: Improvement and Practice, 11(2), 149-162. doi:10.1002/spip.256
Terry, M., Kay, M., & Lafreniere, B. (2010). Perceptions and practices of usability in the free/open source software (FoSS) community. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 999-1008). Atlanta, Georgia, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1753326.1753476