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The paper introduces PersonaFlow, a tool that automatically generates editable user personas from OSS repository data and displays them alongside issue reports to foster empathy. A user study with 13 OSS developers showed that PersonaFlow led to shifts in user understanding and more user-centered responses in issue handling. The study identified two pathways to this change: emotional connection and pragmatic triaging, both resulting in more empathetic behavior.
OSS developers who saw automatically generated user personas responded to issues with more empathy and tailored explanations, suggesting a simple UI intervention can bridge the user-developer gap.
Open-source software (OSS) developers often struggle to understand and respond to user context, while existing tools, such as issue trackers (for handling bugs, requests, and feedback), largely focus on technical discussion. Although personas could help, limited resources and UX expertise make them hard to scale. We present PersonaFlow, a tool that generates editable user personas from OSS repository artifacts and integrates them alongside issue reports. In a user study with 13 OSS developers, most reported shifts in how they understood users, and more than half modified their responses by adding empathetic language, tailoring explanations, or raising priority ratings. We found two pathways to this change: some connected emotionally to personas as people, while others used them pragmatically for triaging. Both appeared to lead to more user-centered behavior. We contribute design implications for persona-based tools relevant to OSS and other contexts where efficiency-driven systems or workflows obscure valuable human elements.
