OpenSource Usability Labs

Thank you all for the great participation in the challenge… As we hoped everyone would have some fun, there still is a serious goal behind it: Defining the new frame for Tine 2.0 and getting you - our users - into the boat. So now we have come up with what we would call the final prototype. Final in terms of: if you do not find anything bothering you and telling us so, we will start to implement it.

More information?

Find the whole challenge here

Find the final prototype here

Please comment in the Tine 2.0 Forum on this and rather not in my blog - so we only have one discussion!

Today I closed the 2nd KMail icon test. This time 1945 people took part. Much less people than the last time, but also the drop-out was much less than last time.

So here are some basic statistics:

• Selected language: English: 1002, German: 476, Spanish: 334, Italian: 76, Polish: 57
• Gender: Male: 99%, Female: 1%
• Average Age: 28,6 years (from 11 to 93)
• Most of the participants are strong KDE users. More than 80% use KDE very frequently. Next is Windows (TM) with more than 25% of frequent users, GNome with about 10% and Mac OS (TM) with about 7%.
• The participants are almost half split in their use of KMail, more than 50% use KMail frequently and about 30% say they never use KMail (the rest in somewhere in between).

In this test we included the icons of two elements of KMail: The icons used in the window and in the message menu of the composer window. These are icons of different size in the standard configuration of KDE, so we presented the icons in the according size and used the KUbuntu translations of the terms associated with them. The overall findings are very good. Most icon-term-relations seem to work out fine. We did not find find any explicitly not working relations, but some still show the potential for improvement.

Icon-Term relations working really well

The following icon-term relations seem to work well. Read the rest of this entry »

The second icon test for KMail Icons is still running. If you have not participated yet, please do so now!

Please invest 5 minutes of your precious time and participate in our little survey to improve the quality of the oxygen icon-set!

This time we are testing two small sets of 8 icons each used in the composer window of KMail and the “Message”-menu of the composer window. Thanks to Pierluca and Caig, the tests are available in English, German, Polish (improved, thanks to Andrzej!), Spanish  and from now on also in Italian! Perhaps you would like to help to make your language available as well? Or want to help to improve your language next time? Well, just write me a mail!

Click to start the test (maximum 5 minutes)

We will publish the main findings in our blog. If you are interested in the results in greater detail, please write me a mail.

Jochen S. asked me to publish the distribution of the age of the participants of the test. I am happy to do so (Thanks to rKward!)…

All participants of the test:

Mean:  27,9 years
Standard deviation: 7,5 years

Frequent users of KMail:

Read the rest of this entry »

It is great to see how many people participated in the first icon test for KMail: 3327 started the test and 2399 finished. This is a drop-out of about 28% across the whole study and fairly good for this kind of study - especially seeing the technical difficulties we had when we started the study.

Here is a first brief summary of the results:

• Selected language: English: 2244, German: 659, Spanish: 313, Polish: 109
• Gender: Male: 98%, Female: 2%
• Average Age: 29 years (from 10 to 88)

It is great to see that we got sufficient participants for reliable results in all languages!

As you might know, our test combines multiple indicators and calculates a single value for each icon-term relationship. The maximum value an icon-term-relation can reach is 10,0. Following I split up the results into 3 groups: Read the rest of this entry »

We always try our new paths in user participation in the development of Tine 2.0. Inspired by the great ideas Thasmo had in our forum, we decided that we want to try to integrate our users even more into the process of re-designing the Tine 2.0 applications-frame. So we ask you to provide and discuss ideas with us and the other users. Please have a look at our

Tine 2.0 community mock-up challenge.

Have fun!

It is really great to see how many of you already took part in our KMail-Icon-Test. A lot of questions arrived my by mail or in my blog, so I thought I would just explain a little about testing icons…

We do this testing, because icons are useful and beautiful - they save place and people can recognize them faster than they can read text. Practically icons work via a visual-metaphor. If that metaphor, however, is not understood by the user, Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you, to all you those about 30 Tine 2.0 users who have answered our survey accompanying the last beta phase. Your participation is very welcome!

As you will have noticed, we introduced a new welcome / log-in screen to Tine 2.0. On that screen you will get informed whenever we start a new survey. This way we want to better get in touch with the users of Tine 2.0 - and we want to understand in how we can make Tine 2.0 better for them. In the past we had the problem that by our means of publishing the surveys, we mainly got responses from Tine 2.0 admins, who have a real reason to visit our homepage. The opinion from them helped us a lot, but we need to get more feedback also from less technical users.

In this light I would like to say thank you for your trust. The results of the survey Read the rest of this entry »

Please invest 5 minutes of your precious time and participate in our little survey:

Testing KMail-Icons, part 1

(about 5 minutes - English, German, Polish and Spanish available).

As you might know, we work together with KDE, the artists team and Nuno Pinhero in person to improve the quality of the icons used in KDE SC. Therefore we will publish new, short studies every couple of weeks. We want to find out, which icons of KDE SC are easy to understand and which ones don’t yet work so well. For getting a realistic and exact analysis, every icon-test will focus a special application or parts of it.

This is the first test of KDE SC icons. We start with a focus on the icons used in the main view of KMail (yes, you can find all of them in a fresh installation, even though you will probably not be aware of some of them…). Thanks to Adam, Álvaro, Sebastian, Isaac and Feargal this survey is available in english, german, polish and spanish. If you find anything we can improve or if you want to help us to provide the next survey in even more languages, please write me a mail.

We will publish the main findings in our blog. If you are interested in the results in greater detail, please write me a mail.