**Acknowledgements**

• OSS projects that want to apply the steps to incorporate techniques and need to find an expert in HCI or an HCI student guided by an expert mentor can do so by publishing advertisements in the webpage, forum, wiki and blogs of the project. Furthermore, the administrator of the OSS project can get in touch with universities to encourage expert usability students to collaborate in the application of techniques to improve the usability of an OSS application. • One of the underlying principles of the OSS community is collaboration [23, 38]. However, we did not get much collaboration during the application of the technique because real users (i.e., users registered at the project Source-Forge website) are perhaps short of time or unaware of the importance of usability. On this ground, we suggest that technique application should be publicised through social networks to recruit as many participants as possible. • The OSS community should (with the administrator's permission) provide incentives to encourage users to participate in this type of initiatives (i.e. participate in the application of usability techniques). A possible example of one such incentive would be public acknowledgement of users that have made contributions towards improving the application

• By adapting this technique in particular, we were able to determine that it is possible to incorporate it into small OSS projects. Because these techniques demand conditions that OSS projects generally cannot meet, it is necessary to make adaptations to bring them closer to the idiosyncrasy of OSS projects. This result reinforces the theory that it is possible to incorporate adapted usability techniques in OSS projects considering Usability Framework

The goal of this research was to evaluate the feasibility of adopting HCI usability techniques in OSS projects. We adapted the focus groups technique for adoption. Through adaptation, we were able to account for some OSS development characteristics that pose an obstacle to the application of the technique as per HCI recommendations (for example, OSS developers and users are geographically distributed). In particular, we adapted the focus groups usability

It is not easy to recruit volunteer users to participate in OSS usability projects. As already mentioned, users often do not have much time, and it is hard to get them to take part without an incentive. With the focus groups technique, although we did not get much collaboration from users or even the principal developers, we did manage to apply the technique because it requires only a small number of participants to get a reliable result [14, 15, 34–36]. Author opinions differ as to the number of users to be taken into account for the focus groups technique to be successful [14, 15, 34–36]. Most of these authors agree that a focus group should include from six to nine users if it is to work. Fewer than six participants would not generate enough ideas for discussion. In this research, however, any users that are willing to collaborate are allowed to, that is, there is no limit on the number of users because this would go against

interaction design in a section of the project website.

proposed by Castro.

58 Trends in E-learning

**7. Conclusions and future research**

technique for application in the ERMaster OSS project.

This research was funded by the SENESCYT-Ecuador, and Quevedo State Technical University. Also this research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports FLEXOR (TIN2014-52129-R) and TIN2014-60490-P projects and the eMadrid-CM project (S2013/ICE-2715). Finally, this research received funding from the "DIUDA 22316 Project" of the University of Atacama.
