2025/04/11 by Lázaro Costa, Costa, Lázaro, Susana Barbosa +3
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Persona Design and Applications #Scientific Computing and Data Management #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.08647
openalex publication_date 2025/04/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
User studies are paramount for advancing science. However, researchers face several barriers when performing them despite the existence of supporting tools. In this work, we study how existing tools and their features cope with previously identified barriers. Moreover, we propose new features for the barriers that lack support. We validated our proposal with 102 researchers, achieving statistically significant positive support for all but one feature. We study the current gap between tools and barriers, using features as the bridge. We show there is a significant lack of support for several barriers, as some have no single tool to support them.