A quick OSS complexity checker

The following quick checklist will give you a feel for whether your OSS is too complex for general users:

  1. Who are the personas that interact with your OSS (give those personas names and attributes to give life to them)
  2. What are they trying to achieve with your OSS (what specific use cases do they fulfil)
  3. How many hours a week do the personas dedicate to those tasks (ie full-time, part-time, occasional)
  4. Compare that with how many hours per week it actually takes them to become (and stay) proficient

Don’t just estimate, collect actual user experiences / feelings.

Readers of this blog probably tend to spend all our working hours on our OSS, but for many of our users  OSS are only a part-time means-to-an-end. Many of the users of our OSS will also be situated in roles where there is high turnover (and therefore high training costs). As such, our user experience design has to assume a lower level of expertise than your peers have.

Now to extend the list above just a little further:

5. How do we use our understanding of item 2 above to monetise our OSS (either internally or externally)

6. Is there a clear association between a customer’s investment (ie item 5) and the value it’s creating for them (ie a value multiplier)

If the value equation (item 6) is too complex, your OSS will get lumped into the “cost-centre” bucket that is holding our industry back.

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