OpenSource Usability Labs

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.

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

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.

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Today I found an article by Sam Dean who asks for a Centralized, State-of-the-Art Open Source Usability Lab. He refers to a cnet article by Matt Asay in which he postulates what Open Source can learn from Apple. Both articles point out that there is need for a shifting view in Open Source. Open Source needs to be more user-driven and less developer-centric - in other words there is a need for usability in Open Source work.

Well, there are good and bad news for both of them:
It is not as easy as they think but we have already come much further than they think!

To explain this I would like to clarify some myths on Open Source Usability:

Usability plays no role in Open Source development.

The OpenUsability.org initiative has provided Usability guidance to hundreds of Open Source projects for more than 5 years. We have worked with various  projects from big ones like Wikipedia or KDE to very small ones. Many projects have developed their own Usability-Community like the OpenOffice Renaissance or the KDE Usability project. Celeste Paul - one of the members of OpenUsability and KDE Usability - has just recently been elected into the KDE e.V. board.

So there is a community willing to assist Open Source projects on the user front and their work is been widely accepted.

Additionally our service, the OpenSource Usability Labs,  provides professional usability support to commercial Open-Source projects and traditional usability companys have detected Open-Source as a market by now.

Commercial Software always has a better Usability than Open Source Software.

First of all: the quality in commercial software varies as much as in open source. There are products with excellent usability around and there is just the opposite. In both cases the bad products die sooner or later.

So what we need to think about is: “What is possible for Usability in Open Source development?”

There are numerous Open Source projects around that provide excellent usability. Firefox challenges the Microsoft Internet Explorer. Think of projects like gallery, KDE4 or Tine2.0. All have undergone rewrites in order to enhance their usability and all have proven to be successful in relation to the age of the project.

So there is prove that Open Source projects are capable of a really good user experience.

Open-source software ends up being written for other developers.

This argument used to be true. Back in those good old days Open Source was successful, because developers could directly influence and change the software. If the software did not match their needs, they simply took the code and changed whatever they did not like. Projects split up, died, new ones were started - they evoluted. And by this they also evoluted a perfect usability - perfect for software developers which happened to be the main target group. In other words: those products evoluted perfect usability.

Nowadays that the user-base shifts, the goals in development differentiate. Projects that need to be used by average Joes and Janes build up user-feedback channels, integrate usability experts into the development and do regular user testing. They get designed for the average Joes and Janes.

Usability is a matter of a centralized lab.

This is actually not a special Open Source myth, but it is nevertheless wrong. Good usability can only be reached through a user-centric development process. A lab can be very handy during this process, but it is not the backbone. Usability experts need to be tightly integrated into the processes - from the definition of requirements, the evaluation of user goal, setting the information architecture to actually testing the products.

This is possible even in those distributed  and self-motivated development-teams you usually find in Open-Source projects. By tying it all into a single, centralized lab, as Sam Dean suggests, you would loose the strengths of this distributed development - just think of the requirements arising from different cultural needs.

Even more: Open-Source software is much more capable to integrate their users then a single lab would allow. Our experience is that Open-Source user are very willing to give feedback to the developers. While customers of commercial projects often ask: “What do I get, when I contribute?”, Open-Source users feel it is a good chance to say “Thank you” to the developers for providing a great piece of software.

By collaborating via the Internet it is not only a dream to activate this potential - it is reality. For example, we have just started an Icon Usability-Test for the new Oxygen k3b-Icons and we got more then 2000 participants within just 2 days.

Summing it up

The evolutionary process that stands behind Open Source development has already adopted to the idea of user centric development. Just as it will adopt to any other upcoming need in software development. And Usability on the other hand has started to understand the needs and the potentials of the Open Source idea, and makes great advances in activating them for the good of the projects.

For sure we are just at the beginning of a long journey. But we are already on the road. Articles like the ones from Sam and Matt show the increasing public demand for more usable Open Source products. I am sure the community notices these signals and will just speed up. The foundations are being laid…

Anne and I will be at the LinuxTag in Berlin. Hope it will be as much fun as in the last years!

The plans are at the moment that at least one of us will be there on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, as well as Friday the whole day. We will be mainly at the Tine 2.0 booth (Halle 7.2a Stand 102a). You will have the possibility to participate in a small Icon-Usabilitytest to identify the best icons for the new Tine calender-app there!

We are looking forward to discuss any issue with you concerning the Usability of Tine 2.0 or any other Open Source Software.

Good news for all students of usability, user-interface design, interaction design,…: The initiative Open Usability has started the call for participation for the Season of Usability 2009 (a very big THANK YOU to Celeste for organizing and finding sponsors!!!).

The Season of Usability provides students the opportunity to practice what they have learned in university on a real Free/Libre/Open-source software project. The list of projects this year is great again:

• Amarok
• Drupal
• Gallery
• GeneMANIA
• Ubuntu - GNOME User Management Tool
• Kadu
• KOrganizer
• OLM
• SemNotes
• KUbuntu Add/Remove… Software

Of course I will again work as a usability-mentor for the SoU 2009. This year I am mentor for the Gallery project. This project is interested in learning more about its users. Project activities will include user research activities such as surveys, interviews, creating user groups and personas, and competitive analysis.

I will be really enjoying this job, as we have worked hard on our survey-platform Icon Test and the connected questionnaire methods. They will be of great use for the student and the gallery project.

Are any of those projects interesting for you? Then don’t hesitate to apply.

Hurray! Tine 2.0 has qualified as a finalist in the  Trophées du Libre. Congratulations to the whole team! Good work gets appreciated

Footnote:
I am in the jury of Trophées du Libre, but as I am juror in the category “Education”, I had no influence on the nomination of Tine in the category “Professional”.

Our family of companies (OpenSource-Usability-Labs, Apliki and binaere bauten) has finally moved from eGroupware to Tine 2.0 as our leading groupware system. Only for the in Tine 2.0 still missing calender we continue to use the eGroupware calendar.

I was quite nervous promoting and pushing the decision to do so. The dialogues and workflows of Tine show to a very great extent my handwriting. Therefore everything that does not yet work as expected falls back on me. And one thing is for sure: Tine 2.0 is still a young project, having many bugs and lacking features at this point of time.

So why did I promote the change? First of all I was always very unhappy about eGroupware. It is feature rich, but - many complex technical product have this problem - most users could not use more than perhaps 20% of these features. We had eGroupware running for more than 2 years now - still whenever I talked to Conny or Lars telling them that I failed to do this or that with eGroupware the answer was always the same: It is possible. Just this did not help me in my daily life. So in my eyes the lacking features of Tine 2.0 compared to eGroupware are to a great extent only virtually missing, because for the normal user eGroupware is not feature-rich, it is confusing.

The second reason to change to Tine 2.0 in productive use is of course to get feedback. I am in charge for the usability part of the development - but until now we did not have the chance to actually test the concepts we have thought out. So now is the time to get back to earth and see whether things work out the way we hope. Next to using Tine 2.0 ourselves, we will start doing active usability testing from February on.

So what is my intermediate result after about 3 weeks of active Tine usage?

Honestly, I am overwhelmed. There are a lot of bugs. To a great extent these are not severe bugs - they just get in your ways here and there - but hey: we are working on a development snapshot. What should one expect? But the integration of different aspects of groupware is just great. The filter-list-system is working well (of course: it still needs a little polishing). Still more than this: Using Tine is just fun. Working with eGroupware I always felt like: ok, this is the application we use, so teeth together and do what you need to do. So I always did what I really had to do, but never more than that. With Tine 2.0 it is just the opposite. I really enjoy working with Tine. I have caught myself just playing around with Tine, exploring the possibilities. This way I did what is most important for a groupware: I used it. I put all the information in Tine that never found their way into eGroupware.

Summing it up: except for the painfully missing calendar, I think Tine 2.0 is a great groupware. It has less features than eGroupware, but overcompensates this by being straight forward and fun to use. The decision to change from eGroupware to Tine 2.0 was a good one! I hope the usability tests we conduct in the next time will confirm this picture.