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:
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:
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:
(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.
I am very happy that our blog is now aggregated on planet KDE!
I am Björn, usability professional for more than 10 years and one of the founders of OpenUsability.org. I have been working in and with open source for a very long time now. Therefore I am very happy that we now found a way how we as a usability consulting company can actually contribute to KDE.
And this is what we are going to do first: We are supporting Nuno Pinhero and the other artists of KDE by measuring the quality or usability of the icons used in the oxygen icon set.We do this in order to continuously improve the quality of the standard icon set used for the KDE SC - and make KDE SC rock even more!
To achieve this goal we will need your help. We will regularly ask you to participate in a short icon test survey. We will try to keep all surveys shorter than 5 minutes, so it is not too much of a hassle for you. We plan to set up a new survey every 2-4 weeks. The first will start in the next couple of days.
Also I am personally interested in the intercultural quality of icons or, say it differently: the necessity to internationalize not only text, but icons as well. To achieve this we will on the long run need some people willing to help us translating the surveys. If you should be interested, please just send me a mail.
We are able to do what we do here, because we are running a service that helps developers to understand what their users actually want. Testing icons is only one part of the game - there are many more possibilities. We are - additionally to what we do with the artists team - very happy to support anyone from the KDE community in getting to know their users and develop even better products. Same as above: If you are interested, please send me a mail.
First of all:
A BIG thank you to all the 143 participants that took all the way of our survey! Your feedback helps us a lot, because we are doing Tine 2.0 only for you! If you missed participation this time: join us on our mailing-list for Tine 2.0 surveys!
Let’s take a look at the main results:
We asked you to sort a couple of ideas we have on what features we could work on next. It showed no real winner, so I guess all our ideas have to be integrated in Tine 2.0. Still some points that seem to be more important are:
These 5 were the winners and we will gladly consider your voting in our feature-plan.
Also we got a lot of comments on features you would like to see. Of course, we will discuss your ideas and in the next survey we will ask how relevant they are for all of you!
This summer I participated in the SoU project with Gallery, the open source photo sharing software. The broad goal of the project was to conduct a survey to learn more about Gallery’s users in moving toward the release of the 3rd version of the software. The project was a success in terms of garnering useful data for Gallery, but, importantly, it was an incredibly valuable learning experience for me.
As a student working towards a masters in Human-Computer Interaction, I have learned about and conducted user research and usability studies in my coursework. But, what SoU provided me that no school project ever could was the opportunity to engage in research that has an actual impact on improving a product— and the opportunity to experience all the challenges that go along with that.
At the start of the project, I have to say I was a bit overwhelmed with what direction to take, but with the guidance of Björn as my mentor, the help of Jakob, a former SoU student who continues to work on the Gallery project, and the awesome tools of Usability-Methods.com, I soon found my way. Here are some of the lessons I learned along the way.
There are many directions for the Tine 2.0 development we are discussing at the moment. But in the good tradition of our development we really want to know what you - our users and potential user - want us to do. So we decided to start a short survey and kindly ask you to participate - it will cost you less then 5 minutes and helps you and us to make Tine 2.0 the most rocking groupware around!
(The survey is powered by usability-methods.com)
