Identifying barriers on the journey to open source adoption

In collaboration with Rachel Price, I led a project for Google Cloud through a critical User Research study that successfully identified barriers to Open Source contribution. This was a 9 week project I worked on in 2019, at Guidea – an award-winning Design Strategy firm.

Challenge:

Documentation creation and governance is core part of project health, yet it is hard to find volunteers to do this. Motivating users to contribute and maintain documentation is an ongoing problem.


Approach:

  • Stakeholder Interviews
  • Strategy Workshop
  • Remote Ethnographic Interviews
  • Research Analysis
  • Customer Modeling
  • Experience Workshop

Solution:

We provided our client with a holistic strategy to effectively address and improve the ‘Journey to Open Source Adoption’.

Remote Ethnographic Research

Behavioral Archetypes & Journey Maps

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Impact:

This study resulted in the implementation of processes that effectively optimized the adoption of Open Source documentation for projects including Apache Airflow. Findings were presented at Google Next and other Open Source conferences.