I would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all of you that volunteered in our last diary survey. Your feedback was very valuable - keep the spirit up!

What do we have at the moment?

• Kontact Mobile is running on Maemo on the N900. Soon there will also be a version for HTC Touch Pro 2.
• It provides email, calendar, ToDos, addresses and notes. You can sync with a Kolab-Server and handle imap resources.
• The application is technically stable (it relies on most parts on the code for the desktop, so it should be save to use it with real data - I do it too).
• Most basic navigational issues from last test have improved a lot and we added lots of functionality to all of the applications (not-yet-implemented functionality is marked red)
• On the downside: The application is still pretty slow, esp. during initialisation. Please be patient. Also there are some configuration dialogues that are still pretty ugly (if you find one, please report it to bugs.kde.org) and last but not least we are still missing mass-actions (e.g. move several mails). We are aware of this and promise to improve this further!

How can you help us?

• Install the current unstable version to your N900 (find instructions on kontact-mobile userbase page)
• Use it and take some note on what is good and what is not sooo good:)
• Report technical bugs you find to bugs.kde.org - please ensure that you use the *-mobile products to file the bugs, so we can find and fix them
• Report your experiences to our short survey - in there we will ask you about tasks you wanted to do, that went really good, ok, and where you failed (no diary this time!).

For discussion and support we have set up two mailing lists. For the more technical issues please join the Kontact Mobile list and for issues concerning the actual use, please join the Kontact Mobile Users list.

Kontact Mobile has been under heavy development for the last weeks and however it is still at an early stage we encourage everybody to contribute and to become part of the process!

You can find all information concerning the testing in this mail:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-mobile-users/2010-August/000027.html

You will do real pioneer work with reporting what you liked and didn’t like as well as your ideas on usability and interaction design. This will help the developer team to create a great user experience for Kontact Mobile in future. Help us to shape this great product!

As you know we ask you - our users on the log-in screen to participate in short surveys. They all have one common goal: to assess your impression of the quality of Tine 2.0. So, how do you like Tine 2.0?

The overall impression of Tine 2.0 is good (about 2.4 on a scale from 1 (excellent) to 7 (needs improvements)). The rating of the individual applications varies with addressbook and calendar leading with approximately the same value as the Tine 2.0 overall impression. The other important applications (Tasks, Email, Admin) follow, getting good to above average ratings while still leaving some room for improvements. Only sales, phone and voipmanager get below average ratings.

So, with Mialena we decided to improve the basic concepts in Tine 2.0 further. Most application now have a proper filter- and favorites concept. We hope this will better your impression of most of the applications. We also decided to move the navigation from the Outlook-like-app-pile to a modern Tab-interface. I am curious how you like this! We also spent some love to calender, email and syncing (my N900 now works fine!) - and of course some more which you should not hesitate to find out!

For a lot improvements we did your free comments inspired us a lot. We believe that we managed to fulfill about 50% of the free suggestions you made in Mialena now. So thanks for that input and keep on going like this. It really hepls us a lot to get even better!

We also asked you a couple of other questions about your context of use (mainly business, but also for other private purposes, managing between 1 and 800 users) and the necessity for a handbook (about 40% would like one) or seminars (about 25% would like one). Even though we need to get better in documentation on our wiki and other resources (so you told us!), most of the users are quite satisfied with the documentation and help they can already get.

So, please check out Mialena and continue to participate in our surveys - and in any other way you like. We desperately seeking for designer wanting to contribute to the look and feel (esp. icons need to be done), volunteers working on documentation and in the forum - or how would you like to participate in the Tine 2.0 development?

You are very welcome to just drop in if you like!

As always it is our task to make sure that the product in the end will be stunning and usable and as always we need your help to get there!

Now we are looking for people that are intersted in building up a testing and feedback community for this project. This community will be integrated into the further development and will help us by this to make the mobile version of Kontact rock!

It would be helpful if you own a N900, because there will be packages for this device available really soon - but there is no need to have one. We also look for people that will give us feedback on their personal needs and wants concerning the mobile use of a PIM suit.

What can you do next?

• Subscribe to our mailing list
• Visit Linuxtag in Berlin and take a look at what we got so far at the booth of the BSI (Halle 7.2b, Stand 215) or visit our small get-together on friday morning.

I will be around at Linuxtag as well - and will be happy to meet you!

We invite you to take part in an informal meeting to share thoughts, experiences and other information covering the topics Usability and User Experience in the Free Software world. The meeting is organized by Björn from OpenUsability.org and Christoph from the OpenOffice.org User Experience Team.

You should join if you are interested in:

• Integrating User Centered Development into the development of your FOSS project
• Wanting to add your UX expertize to a FOSS project
• Wondering how to take benefits out of community work with real users
• Some usability tips for your FOSS project
• …

We are looking forward to see you at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany!

Go ahead and find more information on the Informal Meeting Wiki page.

Cheers,
Björn

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!

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. You have to consider that users had to pick from only 8 choices this time, so it was much easier to exclude all the less fitting icons to find the one to choose. But the data of none of the following icons showed any evidence for this.

Note that the icons for “cut” and “copy” were quite often mixed up

Icon-Term relations with some room for improvements

For the following term the icons could be improved. There was quite a high missing value for these icons and the icons got associated with some of the other terms. Also the time people took to spot these icons was quite high, which shows that people just chose the best of the not-so-well-fitting icons, not a convincing icon.

It is interesting to see that the stamp does not work out well for “sending mails”.

Some closing notes…

We are still looking for people to help to translate the test into different languages. Also people wanting to help setting up these icon tests are warmly welcome, as my time is very limited and I do not get to publish new tests and the results as often as I would like to… And of course anyone interested in investigating the results in greater depth is warmly welcome. Just drop me a mail…

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.