OpenSource Usability Labs

Please invest 5 minutes of your precious time and participate in our little survey to improve the quality of the oxygen icon-set!

This time we are testing two small sets of 8 icons each used in the composer window of KMail and the “Message”-menu of the composer window. Thanks to Pierluca and Caig, the tests are available in English, German, Polish (improved, thanks to Andrzej!), Spanish  and from now on also in Italian! Perhaps you would like to help to make your language available as well? Or want to help to improve your language next time? Well, just write me a mail!

Click to start the test (maximum 5 minutes)

We will publish the main findings in our blog. If you are interested in the results in greater detail, please write me a mail.

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…)

Please invest 5 minutes of your precious time and participate in our little survey:

Testing KMail-Icons, part 1

(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.

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.

Wow. Today we closed the Icon Test for TV-Browser. And man - this has been a real test for our Beta-Service. The result: Within one week more than 22000 individual tests have been conducted in our 18 experimental conditions, filling our database with 123404 rows of data. OpenOffice Calc gives up on this amount of data (As an interesting insight: MS Excel on the other hand can read that many rows of data, but not save them).

So it will take us some time to actually get valid (in term of significant) results, as this sheer amount of data first has to be handled. But I will uncover not too much when I say: a first look at the data is promising.

I guess we have found a valid way to actually have users judge the usability of icons of an application. The icon test is easy to set up, it is easy (ok, it will be easy once the platform is finished up…) to get the results and it is fast - in the best meaning of agile usability. You need valid feedback on your icons till tomorrow? No problem anymore!

With our icon test we are able to spot the good and the better-find-another icons in an interface, and we can easily decide which of a set of alternative icons for one term is the one users prefer most.

More soon to be seen on www.icon-test.com!

We just started an online-survey together with the guys from TV-Browser. The question we want to answer is twofold:

1. Which Icons the TV-Browser uses are easy to understand, helpful or in just one word: appropriate? Which Icons should TV-Browser use in future releases?
2. Does the method and the online-Tool we have developed for testing the quality of icons work as good, as we hope it does?

If you are curious: The study is online until the 1st of September 2008. You can participate even if you do not know much about the TV-Browser - as long as you use Firefox Webbrowser, because this study is still beta: Study for checking the quality of icons in TV-Browser.

After starting the study first problems became obvious immediately and most of them got solved quite quickly. I have learned, e.g. that a switch can be “half-broken” eating up lots of, but not all data-packages.

Summing it up: the study runs quite well and we are getting tons of answers by the TV-Browser-Users. It is always fun to have this great community involved into new studies.