Usability is a crucial factor but one of the most neglected concerns in open source software (OSS). While far from an ideal approach, a common practice that OSS communities adopt to collaboratively address usability is through discussions on issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, there is little knowledge about the extent to which OSS community members engage in usability issue discussions, the aspects of usability they frequently target, and the characteristics of their collaboration around usability issue discussions. This knowledge is important for providing practical recommendations and research directions to better support OSS communities in addressing this important topic and improve OSS usability in general. To help achieve this goal, we performed an extensive empirical study on issues discussed in five popular OSS applications: three data science notebook projects (Jupyter Lab, Google Colab, and CoCalc) and two code editor projects (VSCode and Atom). Our results indicated that while usability issues are extensively discussed in the OSS projects, their scope tended to be limited to efficiency and aesthetics. Additionally, these issues are more frequently posted by experienced community members and display distinguishable characteristics, such as involving more visual communication and more participants. Our results provide important implications that can inform the OSS practitioners to better engage the community in usability issue discussion and shed light on future research efforts toward collaboration techniques and tools for discussing niche topics in diverse communities, such as the usability issues in the OSS context.

翻译：可用性是开源软件（OSS）的关键因素，却也是最常被忽视的问题之一。尽管远非理想方法，但OSS社区普遍采用的一种协作处理可用性的方式是通过问题追踪系统（ITS）进行讨论。然而，关于社区成员参与可用性问题讨论的程度、他们经常关注的可用性维度以及围绕可用性问题讨论的协作特征，目前仍缺乏深入了解。这些知识对于提供实用建议和研究方向至关重要，有助于更好地支持OSS社区处理这一重要议题，并整体提升OSS的可用性。为此，我们对五个流行开源应用中的问题讨论开展了广泛的实证研究，涵盖三个数据科学笔记本项目（Jupyter Lab、Google Colab和CoCalc）和两个代码编辑器项目（VSCode和Atom）。研究结果表明，尽管OSS项目中广泛讨论了可用性问题，但其范围往往局限于效率与美学层面。此外，这些问题更常由经验丰富的社区成员提出，并展现出显著特征，例如涉及更多视觉沟通和更多参与方。我们的研究结果为OSS从业者提供了重要启示，有助于他们更好地引导社区参与可用性问题讨论，并为未来研究协作技术与工具以促进多元社区中特定话题（如OSS背景下的可用性问题）探讨指明了方向。