We draw on the idea of the reflective practitioner to consider how end users can directly contribute to user experience design discussions in open source projects. People with expertise in their own use context but without programming or user experience analysis and design skills can provide reflections on personal experiences.

We present design concepts and related mockups that support the user experience for projects hosted on CodePlex, an open source project hosting website. Rationale for the design concepts is grounded in the open source literature and a thirteen-week study with the CodePlex team. We propose that fostering ways to build trust, providing opportunities for merit, supporting crossover of work activities, and supporting user experience (UX) best practices in CodePlex will help dismantle the social and technological barriers for UX and encourage UX designer participation. We address UX designer motivation as a challenge for participation and conclude that the mockups presented are a first step in furthering the user experience in open source software development.

We report results from interviews with HCI design researchers on their perceptions of how their research relates to the more traditional scientific goal of providing explanations. Theories of explanation are prominent in the physical and natural sciences, psychology, the social sciences, and engineering. Little work though has so-far addressed the special case of how results from reflective design of interactive systems can help provide explanations. We found conceptions of explanation in design research to be broader and more inclusive than those commonly found in the philosophy of science. We synthesized concepts from the interviews into a framework which may help researchers understand how their contributions relate to both classical and emergent conceptions of explanation.

This study explores the characteristics of rationale development in a complex group decision making task and considers design implications for better supporting rationale development in group decision making. Twelve three-person, multi-role teams performed three instances of a collaborative decision making task with physical maps. We used rhetorical structure theory to analyze the structure of their decision making discourse. We found that groups begin their reasoning processing by stating and relating information and finish their reasoning through a point-counterpoint discussion. We also found that established groups reduced their need to analyze information during the last moments of a decision. Implications for the design of group decision support systems to encourage rationale development are presented.