OpenSource Usability Labs

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”.

Today I have started an introduction on the main concepts of Tine 2.0. I hope this will be helpful to new and experienced Tine-users.

I have chosen not to post this introduction as blog-post, since I will try to keep them up-to-date. So you will have to take a look at the static articles in our blog.

So far there is:

• Tine 2.0: concepts and ideas
  • Choosing an application
  • Filtering Lists
  • Places – or how to manage visibility
  • Working with records

I am very happy about comments since I will try to keep working and improving the articles.

We were in the lucky situation to conduct a usability-test with seven volunteers of a German company. They are using Tine 2.0 mainly as CRM-Tool to coordinate their sales-department. Consequently they are using contacts, CRM and tasks, but not the other apps of Tine 2.0. All user were regular, but not frequent users of Tine 2.0 and moderately comfortable with computers in general.

The tests were concepted as semi-structured, task-oriented interviews. I lead all interviews, while Conny Weiß was participating as an active observer. He was allowed to ask and answer any questions during the interview.

The scenario was as follows:

1. Users had to log-in and explain their general impressions and understanding of Tine 2.0.
2. Users had to find and modify an existing contact. Focus of this task was the use of the filter-system as a quick-filter, the short-view of a contact and the modification of an item.
3. Users then had to export a list of contacts to .pdf, that had to be composed by a rather complex filter-setting.
4. Next they were asked to create a to-do-list which only a certain group of people was allowed to see.
5. Finally they were asked to show how they manage a typical task of their daily work with Tine 2.0.

The interviews were very informative. The results were aggregated and transformed into tasks for further development. The detailed results can be found in the bug-tracking-systems of Tine 2.0. Following I will give an overview of the most important findings:

1. General understanding of Tine 2.0 is good
   All users were able to explain the general concepts of Tine 2.0 and were competent to solve even complex tasks. This encourages us to stay with the chosen general approach of Tine 2.0, namely keeping the general screen-estate, the filter-list-view, the application-pile etc.
2. Sometimes Tine 2.0 gets in the users’ way
   In some details Tine 2.0 is not enough consistent, predictive or supportive for the user. We have found heaps of these small Usability-Bugs, showing us that we have to be even more precise with all those little things. Examples for this category are:
   * The addressbook-container has not been correctly pre-selected when adding a new contact
   * Some wording was not understood
   * Not sufficient feedback when filtering caused no results
   * Number of elements in lists are not configurable
   * …
3. Notes should be editable
   The concept of notes was appreciated by the users, but they wanted notes to be editable and they wanted notes to show up at more then one place.
4. No connection between CRM and Tasks
   Users had the problem that they cannot see which CRM-Lead a certain task belongs to.
5. Use of Right-Mouse-Buttons is confusing
   Users were not able to predict where and how they could use the right-mouse-button-menu.
6. Selection of a person is confusing
   The dialogue to select e.g. the responsible person for a task lead to some irritation for the user.

This is just a short summary of the most important findings. A lot of the issues have already been fixed for the upcoming Tine 2.0 Lara release. All other issues are integrated into the further development schedule.

Summing it up: the user test was well worth it and helped us a lot to loose our expert view and once again see Tine 2.0 through the eyes of a “normal user”.

We want you – for Tine 2.0:

If you are interested to support Tine 2.0 development, then join our mailing list for voluntary usability-testers. Your help is very much appreciated and taking part in these tests only takes a little time and is fun! Take a look at our Icon Test demo to get a feeling what these usability-tests could look like.

I have decided to provide some hints how to efficiently work with Tine. And I will do this as a series of blog posts within the next time, accompanying the upcoming spring 2009 release of Tine. Let us start with

Question #1: If Tine 2.0 is so usable, why is there a need for a tutorial?

Tine has been developed with a strong focus on usability. Usability experts and interaction designer have been integrated into the development from day 1 on. We regularly conduct usability tests to improve the product even further. Nevertheless usable does not equal simple or easy to learn. Both attributes are important aspects of a usable product – and of course we try to make Tine as simple and easy to learn as possible. But these attributes are not the foremost criteria for optimizing the user-experience of Tine.

When setting the scope for Tine we have decided that interactions and dialogues of Tine should always be

1. enjoyable – Tine is designed to be fun to use. So everyone should like to use Tine.
2. efficient – Working with Tine must always be efficient. Tine should never come into your way.

In opposite you can say Tine does not maximize the power for a first-time-user. We do not try to oversimplify the rather complex process of a groupware: different, cross-depending applications, a very detailed rights-management,…

So there is a need for some tips how to work efficiently with Tine. These will follow in later posts and hopefully help you to enjoy business collaboration with Tine even more!

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.

We have come quite a long way with Tine 2.0 by now -Addressbook, CRM and Tasks are working. We have implemented these first to demonstrate how Tine 2.0 is supposed to work and look like.

Now it is up to you:

Do you like what we have done? What can we do even better? What is missing to make Tine 2.0 the best groupware?

Tine 2.0 is Open-Source. It is made for you – and in contrast to closed-source software it is also made by you! So you are warmly welcome to test Tine 2.0 and help us to make it even better. In order to do so, we have set up a forum, where we would like to actively discuss any ideas, criticism, suggestions,… on what we have achieved so far and where Tine should go in future.

We will also run a couple of surveys, starting next week – you will be informed right here.

So take your chance and contribute to make Tine 2.0 the best groupware – for you!

The Icon Usability Test of the TV-Browser icons has been closed for some time now. We have been busy learning from that study and working on further improvements for the icon test. So I totally forgot to write about the actual results…

Just as a reminder – the aim of the study was twofold:

First, we wanted to prove the method, which worked very well and we are going to publish the results in some scientific magazine sometime.

The second goal was to reveal the good and the not so good icons in TV-Browser. For the test we used some icons that are visible in TV-Browser and the tool-tips provided for them. We then asked the user of TV-Browser (they should be used to the icons!) to attend the survey – and they did indeed! A great “Thank you” to all of you who have participated!

And these are the results in short:

The following icons proved to be just great and really helpful for the user:

Print, Reminder Function, Favorite program, Search, Filter

A second set of icons worked alright, but has the potential to be improved:

List of currently running programs, Simple marker plug in

And finally some icons showed the definite necessity for an improvement:

Start external Program, Tool for translators, Get recent TV listings, Rate program

Now we are working on an second study, in which we will test alternative icons for those last functions. In this study we are going to present alterative icons to the users, which then have to pick the icons that fit best for he function. At last we are going to test the new set of icons to prove the improvement, that we hopefully will have achieved by then!

Next to TV-Browser, we are also working on a study for the testing of Tine 2.0 icons. Hopefully I will be back to you with some news on that issues soon!

Last week we had a closer look at the filter settings for Tine 2.0. Filters are a central part of the user interface concept, because interacting with Tine 2.0 follows a clear structure:

1. John picks the sub-app, e.g. Contacts he wants and needs.
2. He then gets a list of available item, which he needs to narrow down.
3. He identifies the item he was looking for and is doing some action with it.

This workflow is true for almost all kinds of sub applications. Filters come in play in step 2. Here John needs some easy way to narrow down the list of items. We want to achieve this by the use of a strong and still easy to use set of filters. Take a look at a working draft of how these filters could look like:

The operator in the middle will be only active, when it is needed, e.g. for narrowing down dates or postal codes, so it does not come into John’s way when he uses <TAB> for navigating.

In the default view John will see only one filter line showing a quickfilter. This would be

[Contact|V] contains [____________________]

for address book. This way he always has a one-click search-like filter setting available for doing the 95% of the searches he needs to do. Still, the other 5%, where John needs to do a complex filtering are available just as easy!

One the fascinating ideas of this concept is the possibility to save these complex, but powerful and often needed filter sets. So John can do frequent searches with one click faster then ever before! And there is no limit to individualisation. Susan, Paul and James can define and access their most needed tasks this way. Tine 2.0 will be just right and powerful for all of them – and for you!

On LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin the OpenSource Usability Labs were invited by the Tine 2.0 project. So I was at their booth a fair bit of the time, discussing the concepts, screens and ideas we have. The feedback was great – a lot of people encouraged us in our work. The main feedback was: there is no easy-to-use OpenSource groupware-solution for small and medium-sized enterprises around but there is definitely a need for one! So hey-ho – let’s go, Tine!

We demonstrated what we call a technology preview. This preview reveals some of the basic functionality and some of our interaction-concepts. The visitors were impressed by the ease of interaction made possible by newest Web 2.0 technology. But make up your own mind and try out what we have achieved so far.

Additionally we made a web-based icon-understandability test on the booth. So visitors could help us to understand what icons are already well understood – and which icons still need to be improved. This way visitors had the possibility to directly influence the usability of Tine 2.0. We will provide this facility for all of you, who could not attend LinuxTag on the Tine-Website soon. Tools like this are extremely important for achieving the certification as being developed according to ISO 13407.

Next to Tine I promoted the idea of the OpenSource Usability Labs. There were quite a few commercial OpenSource Projects around on LinuxTag. I talked to a lot of people about our ideas of professional OpenSource Usability, our philosophy and our business models – and most of them found the ideas very interesting.

I really enjoyed LinuxTag and already look forward to next year’s edition! Thanks to all the guys making this possible. We should not forget that this event is mainly the result of , oluntary work.

Only one week left to LinuxTag in Berlin (28th to 31st of May)! It is always a great event and I am looking forward to meet all the great people that are engaged in the OpenSource community! And of course I am personally happy that this event has settled in Berlin – and I do not need to travel for it anymore

Unfortunately the OpenSource Usability Labs will – this year – not have there own booth on LinuxTag. But you will find me most of the time at the Tine 2.0 booth. It is located in hall 7.2a booth no. 115.

I am very happy to get feedback on the ideas we can present up to now with Tine 2.0. Feel free to discuss the concepts in User-Interface- and User-Interaction-Design with me. As well I am looking forward to discuss any issues related to usability in OpenSource in general – be it in the scope of the OpenUsability-Initiative or a matter of the OpenSource Usability Labs.

See you on LinuxTag!