OpenSource Usability Labs

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!

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!

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, (more…)

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 (more…)

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:

What shall we do next?

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:

• Dashboard
• Birthday in Calendar
• Attachments
• Editable Notes
• Linking

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!

How do you like and use Tine 2.0?

(more…)

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!

Tine 2.0 user survey

(The survey is powered by usability-methods.com)

I want to thank everyone who was interested in taking part in the Usability calendar tests. Unfortunately I could only invite people from Berlin, because the tests had to be conducted in person. So a special thanks to all the testers that came!

In the test I focused on the Tine 2.0 calendar. The tasks included creating a shared calendar, creating whole day and recurring events, inviting, copying data from the address book to the description of an event, accepting an invitation and moving an appointment to another calendar.

These are the top 5 problems the testers had:

1. For moving an appointment to another calendar, nearly everyone tried to drag and drop this appointment. (#1460 in the Bugtracker)
2. When inviting people, 2/3 of the testers expected to find the accounts, they shared the calendar with, to be first in the invitation menu. (#1522)
3. When creating a recurring event, 2/3 of all testers found “Every 1. month” irritating. A proposal for redesign is attached to the issue in the Bugtracker. (#1524)
4. Accepting or declinig an invitation is not obvious and fast enough. Two thirds of everyone struggled to complete the task. They couldn’t find said invitation without knowing at which day it was and then didn’t expect to have to open the Edit window to accept. (#1440)
5. When copying data from the business card area in the address book, more than half of all testers tried highlighting and then right clicking to copy. This didn’t work. (#1422)

Including the above problems there will be a priority list handed over to the great guys at Metaways and we’ll hopefully see most of the things already included in the next release of Tine 2.0.

If you have questions, please email me or write a comment.