04_identify-paper-cuts.md 1.2 KB

#7.4 Identify paper cuts The concept of paper cut usability bugs was developed by David Siegel, then on the user experience team at Canonical: […] a paper cut is a bug that will improve user experience if fixed, is small enough for users to become habituated to it, and is trivial to fix. Siegel (2009) In accordance to what Johansson (2005) notes, it is mostly these small issues which are ignored by developers and experienced users but a pain for people who never used the software before. To make it directly visible to contributors which issues are easily fixable, denote paper cuts when listing tasks or tagging in the bug tracker. While seasoned developers might care more about developing new things this is a good help for new contributors. This initiative works very well for Ubuntu, they iterated it for every release as well as specific ones for important software packages. There is a dedicated Papercuts Ninja team for people interested in fixing paper cuts which acts as a starting point for new developers. See also the wiki page. Similar to 7.3 Tag bugs, this outspoken focus on small usability bugs also helps to create general consideration for these issues.