Designing for Cognitive Diversity: Improving the GitHub Experience for Newcomers
Italo Santos, João Felipe Pimentel, Igor Wiese, Igor Steinmacher, Anita Sarma, Marco A. Gerosa
TL;DR
Addresses cognitive diversity gaps in OSS onboarding by evaluating GitHub with GenderMag to identify inclusivity bugs affecting newcomers. The authors implement fixes through a Chrome browser plugin that alters GitHub's interface to improve visibility, feedback, and guidance, and they evaluate the solution with a between-subject study of $n=75$ undergraduates. They identify 12 inclusivity bugs and show that the redesigned interface reduces Abi–Tim performance gaps and increases self-efficacy, with strong statistical support. The work demonstrates that inclusive, cognitive-style-aware design can broaden participation in OSS and offers actionable guidance for social coding platforms and educators.
Abstract
Social coding platforms such as GitHub have become defacto environments for collaborative programming and open source. When these platforms do not support specific cognitive styles, they create barriers to programming for some populations. Research shows that the cognitive styles typically favored by women are often unsupported, creating barriers to entry for woman newcomers. In this paper, we use the GenderMag method to evaluate GitHub to find cognitive style-specific inclusivity bugs. We redesigned the "buggy" GitHub features through a web browser plugin, which we evaluated through a between-subjects experiment (n=75). Our results indicate that the changes to the interface improve users' performance and self-efficacy, mainly for individuals with cognitive styles more common to women. Our results can inspire designers of social coding platforms and software engineering tools to produce more inclusive development environments.