  Usability and user experience (UX) issues are often not well emphasized and
addressed in open source software (OSS) development. There is an imperative
need for supporting OSS communities to collaboratively identify, understand,
and fix UX design issues in a distributed environment. In this paper, we
provide an initial step towards this effort and report on an exploratory study
that investigated how the OSS communities currently reported, discussed,
negotiated, and eventually addressed usability and UX issues. We conducted
in-depth qualitative analysis of selected issue tracking threads from three OSS
projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings indicated that discussions about
usability and UX issues in OSS communities were largely influenced by the
personal opinions and experiences of the participants. Moreover, the
characteristics of the community may have greatly affected the focus of such
discussion.
