Mapping in harmony: Co-designing user interfaces for conflict management on OSM

Online peer-production communities (OPPCs) have witnessed producer conflicts that negatively impact their project quality and producer morale. In response to such issues, OPPCs have supported producers to self-manage conflict as its frequency is exceeding the capacity of volunteer moderators. In this paper, we solicit design guidelines reflecting producers’ requirements and perspectives for self-conflict management in an OPPC called OpenStreetMap (OSM). We use the OSM Changeset Discussions user interface – one of OSM’s tools designed to facilitate conflict management – as our target interface. We conduct co-design workshops to collect OSM mappers’ perspectives on the existing conflict management user interface (UI) and re-design alternatives based on mappers’ suggestions. We collect rich reflections on four design prompts covering the User Experience (UX) criteria of utility, usability, desirability, and adoptability, contrasting the current and alternative Changeset Discussion UI designs. Our results lead to two design guidelines: (1) provide gentle and non-intrusive reminders customized based on OSM’s mapper profile and (2) provide customizable mapper profile information displayed during online discussion. We discuss challenges associated with the co-designing process in an OPPC as OSM and how future studies should focus on making incremental changes based on user-participatory methods to minimize any user resistance.