usability Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a softw ...

and

interaction design Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form (similar to other design fields), its main area of foc ...

, a paper cut bug is defined as "a trivially fixable

bug". The developers of the

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-based

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

describe it as a bug that average users would encounter on their first day of using a brand-new installation of the latest version of Ubuntu Desktop Edition. The analogy is with a paper cut

wound A wound is any disruption of or damage to living tissue, such as skin, mucous membranes, or organs. Wounds can either be the sudden result of direct trauma (mechanical, thermal, chemical), or can develop slowly over time due to underlying diseas ...

—small, not seriously damaging, but surprisingly painful. The use of the term has since spread to other software projects. While some projects have dedicated projects or teams for it, others rely on regular practices to encourage paper cuts to be fixed.

History

The first "paper cut" campaign was in June 2009, and each such release has been accompanied by a paper cut project. Initially the project was intended to have Ubuntu developers and users identify and fix one hundred minor bugs that adversely affect the Ubuntu user experience and complete the work to be included in the release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. The intention was that each of these bugs would require no more than a day's work for a competent programmer. The first ten of the original paper cuts were: #Dim file icons when they were "cut" for later "paste" action #"Move to Trash" option misleading #Ambiguous wording in confirmation alert box #"Eject/Unmount" Human theme icon in

Nautilus A nautilus (; ) is any of the various species within the cephalopod family Nautilidae. This is the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and the suborder Nautilina. It comprises nine living species in two genera, the type genus, ty ...

should have hover and click states #Default folders inside Home Folder, e.g., Documents, Music, should have special icons/emblems #Update manager should warn about laptop running on battery when installing big updates #Consistent Volume "Safe to remove" notifications #"Create Document" sub-menu superfluous when no templates are installed #Nautilus does not assign custom icon to "Downloads" folder #Wi-Fi auto-connection asks for keyring password

Dedicated projects

Some organisations, like

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

, have created dedicated projects to solve paper cuts. They also categorise small missing features that are hard to make part of the regular processes as paper cuts. Combining this with amplifying each of the solved problems social media presence also helped seeing the value of each of the fixes. In GitHub's case the project was started when other community efforts like the browser extension Refined GitHub were started for solving similar projects.

References

{{Ubuntu Ubuntu Canonical (company) Usability