OpenSource Usability Labs

Kontact Mobile is a free email and PIM client (calender, tasks, addresses, notes – also suitable as groupware front-end, e.g. for a Kolab server) for mobile phones. Using Qt allows us to have this software running on different platforms.

On the base of your tremendous feedback in the past we have worked hard on improving Kontact mobile even further.  At the moment Kontact Mobile is running well on Maemo – and Windows Mobile 6.5 is next on our list.

Feel free, test it and provide feedback!

Interested?

1. Download Kontact Mobile: Maemo (Nokia N900); Windows Mobile 6.5 (e.g. HTC Touch Pro 2)
2. Read our instructions and start testing
3. Give feedback until the 5th of November 2010 (anonymous – no registration needed)

This testing period will run for one week (ending Friday the 5th of November).

On the current state of Kontact Mobile for Maemo 5:

We have a solid beta version. Everything should be working, we are perhaps still a bit slow (working on that). And we really want to know how you feel about it!

On the current state of Kontact Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.5:

We have only been testing on HTC Touch Pro 2, but it should be working on other Windows Mobile 6.5 phones as well. Everything seems to be running – although it can be slow, so please be patient. We also know of occasional crashes – but without loosing data or doing greater harm than having to restart the device. If you encounter bugs, please report them. We will try to provide a newer and better version as soon as possible. We will announce availability of new packages here.

More info on the project:

The foundation of this project is the Kontact PIM suite. Kontact is an excellent team player with the Kolab Groupware server and has been developed within the KDE project. It has proven stability and reliability for years. We are now porting this suite to a couple of mobile platforms. The project is free software. So we invite you to give us your opinion on the state we have reached in order to make this piece of free software even better. If you like to get up-to-date information, please join our mailinglist.

Thanks a lot for your contribution!

Kontact Mobile is developing very fast at the moment! Now we are happy to have reached the next beta-version that we really would like you to give us feedback on.

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.

If you own a N900 phone and have tested or want to test Kontact Mobile it would be great if you participate in our current user survey- a diary.

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!

With the new version – Mialena – of Tine 2.0 out, it is time to take a look back at the feedback you provided to us in the past version.

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?

As a reminder for all who are interested in Usability and Open Source – and are at the LinuxTag tomorrow. We will have a very informal meeting from 9 to 12 am in Hall 7, 1a,  Workshop Room “New York 2″.

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

We are very happy to work together with KDAB, Intevation and G10Code on a project to make Kontact available on mobile phones.  This is great as there is no really good mobile mail client around and as it is important for free software to offer such a crucial part of the mobile software infrastructure…

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!

LinuxTag 2010, anybody?

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

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!