How Do Users Talk About Software? Searching for Common Ground

Abstract

Current research on ethics in software engineering focuses on the values of stakeholders and their tradeoffs. While an under-standing of these values is very important, it is not sufficient for a discussion about ethical values between developers and users or in society in general. Values need to be related to the func-tional and quality features of software. In this paper, we argue that we need a better understanding of the user view of software as a common ground for any discussion about the effects of software for its users. When users talk about software, com-pare its features, or complain about its usability, they do not use the terminology and mental models of IT-experts. This hinders effective communication about software in society. However, one cannot expect users to talk like developers. In order to provide such a common ground, we propose to study user utterances and to define a so-called user view lan-guage which comprises the concepts and relationships with which users describe the outside view of software. In this posi-tion paper, we present assumptions and hypotheses related to defining such a language. Furthermore, we present first ideas how to study user utterances. This will help us to better under-stand the current situation: how do users talk about software?