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.

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. (more…)

The second icon test for KMail Icons is still running. If you have not participated yet, please do so now!

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.

Jochen S. asked me to publish the distribution of the age of the participants of the test. I am happy to do so (Thanks to rKward!)…

All participants of the test:

Mean:  27,9 years
Standard deviation: 7,5 years

Frequent users of KMail:

(more…)

It is great to see how many people participated in the first icon test for KMail: 3327 started the test and 2399 finished. This is a drop-out of about 28% across the whole study and fairly good for this kind of study - especially seeing the technical difficulties we had when we started the study.

Here is a first brief summary of the results:

• Selected language: English: 2244, German: 659, Spanish: 313, Polish: 109
• Gender: Male: 98%, Female: 2%
• Average Age: 29 years (from 10 to 88)

It is great to see that we got sufficient participants for reliable results in all languages!

As you might know, our test combines multiple indicators and calculates a single value for each icon-term relationship. The maximum value an icon-term-relation can reach is 10,0. Following I split up the results into 3 groups: (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.

I am very happy that our blog is now aggregated on planet KDE!

I am Björn, usability professional for more than 10 years and one of the founders of OpenUsability.org. I have been working in and with open source for a very long time now. Therefore I am very happy that we now found a way how we as a usability consulting company can actually contribute to KDE.

And this is what we are going to do first: We are supporting Nuno Pinhero and the other artists of KDE by measuring the quality or usability of the icons used in the oxygen icon set.We do this in order to continuously improve the quality of the standard icon set used for the KDE SC - and make KDE SC rock even more!

To achieve this goal we will need your help. We will regularly ask you to participate in a short icon test survey. We will try to keep all surveys shorter than 5 minutes, so it is not too much of a hassle for you. We plan to set up a new survey every 2-4 weeks. The first will start in the next couple of days.

Also I am personally interested in the intercultural quality of icons or, say it differently: the necessity to internationalize not only text, but icons as well. To achieve this we will on the long run need some people willing to help us translating the surveys. If you should be interested, please just send me a mail.

We are able to do what we do here, because we are running a service that helps developers to understand what their users actually want. Testing icons is only one part of the game - there are many more possibilities. We are - additionally to what we do with the artists team - very happy to support anyone from the KDE community in getting to know their users and develop even better products. Same as above: If you are interested, please send me a mail.