  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.
