FLOSS UX Design: An Analysis of User Experience Design in Firefox and OpenOffice.org

We describe two cases of open user experience (UX) design using the Firefox web browser and OpenOffice.org office suite as case studies. We analyze the social complexity of integrating UX practices into the two open source projects using activity awareness, a framework for understanding team performance in collective endeavors of significant scope, duration, and complexity. The facets of activity awareness are common ground, community of practice, social capital, and human development. We found that differences between the communities include different strategies for community building, UX status in the community, type of open UX design, and different ways to share information.