OpenSource Usability Labs

This week we will be doing the Forge 2011 sprint in Madrid – and you have the chance to contribute:

We plan to work on power and network management in KDE and we would be very happy if you would share your experiences with us. We have set-up a small survey that will help us to hopefully do the right things the right way!

The survey in only active until Wednesday, 28th of September. It should take you no more than 5 minutes to fill it out:

CLICK HERE AND PARTICIPATE!
Update: Sorry, I put the wrong link in before – thanks Markus for noting this. The correct link is this one:

http://www.usability-methods.com/survey/fbabc2517f95418ebc84005185abc086/

As Akademy / Desktop Summit was in Berlin this year, I took the chance to participate. I probably wouldn’t if it had been somewhere else – and I have to admit: It was a great decision to take part (and a big mistake not to do so in the years before). A big praise to the organisers!

Everyone with a slight interest in KDE or Gnome should join this conference. I will hopefully be able to attend next akademies again. And hopefully there will be more people with a similar background to mine, doing user resaerch, usability or UX work. We do need you!

Personally I have been talking to dozens of people about better ways of integrating users into the development. My thesis was basically:

The way users are integrated into the projects at the moment is frustrating and (trying to find a nice word) ineffective for both, users and developers. It thus does not bring in the desired amount of new blood nor innovation into the projects.

Interestingly enough, I found no-one who really disagreed with this. On this basis I did talk to developers of a lot of different projects, but also to representatives of the KDE e.V. and user representatives about the problem and how we could use the usability and user-driven-innovation tool we are currently developing to improve the situation. I also managed to do a BoF about it, to get in touch with some people from Gnome and I talked to Michael Meeks from LibreOffice about it.

As a result of these talks, we will start creating user panels for individual projects, by simply popping up a layer that will be asking users to join the panel after some time of usage. We will use this panel to ask usability and demographic questions, but also to motivate users to get – step by step – involved deeper into the projects. A lot work to be done…

As we are entering virgin soil here, we will obviously (need to) gain experiences. If you want to join this ride with your project or just your experience or opinion, you are happily invited to mail me or comment below.

We just have published a new version for Kontact Mobile on Maemo. I would like to encourage you to tell us how you like it.

Why should you try Kontact Mobile and give feedback?
Kontact Mobile is doing really well. It is a promising product, feature rich, free software, KDE and it is here to stay. But the current project of porting Kontact to the mobile world is – what it looks like now – only supported till the end of this year. So we really need your feedback now.  Next year we will not have the same power as now to let your wishes go into the project. So, please try it right away, spread the word and do not forget to

take part in our survey!

Let us K(DE)onquer the mobile world.

Kontact Mobile is a free email and PIM client (calender, tasks, addresses, notes – also suitable as groupware front-end, e.g. for a Kolab server) for mobile phones. Using Qt allows us to have this software running on different platforms.

On the base of your tremendous feedback in the past we have worked hard on improving Kontact mobile even further.  At the moment Kontact Mobile is running well on Maemo – and Windows Mobile 6.5 is next on our list.

Feel free, test it and provide feedback!

Interested?

1. Download Kontact Mobile: Maemo (Nokia N900); Windows Mobile 6.5 (e.g. HTC Touch Pro 2)
2. Read our instructions and start testing
3. Give feedback until the 5th of November 2010 (anonymous – no registration needed)

This testing period will run for one week (ending Friday the 5th of November).

On the current state of Kontact Mobile for Maemo 5:

We have a solid beta version. Everything should be working, we are perhaps still a bit slow (working on that). And we really want to know how you feel about it!

On the current state of Kontact Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.5:

We have only been testing on HTC Touch Pro 2, but it should be working on other Windows Mobile 6.5 phones as well. Everything seems to be running – although it can be slow, so please be patient. We also know of occasional crashes – but without loosing data or doing greater harm than having to restart the device. If you encounter bugs, please report them. We will try to provide a newer and better version as soon as possible. We will announce availability of new packages here.

More info on the project:

The foundation of this project is the Kontact PIM suite. Kontact is an excellent team player with the Kolab Groupware server and has been developed within the KDE project. It has proven stability and reliability for years. We are now porting this suite to a couple of mobile platforms. The project is free software. So we invite you to give us your opinion on the state we have reached in order to make this piece of free software even better. If you like to get up-to-date information, please join our mailinglist.

Thanks a lot for your contribution!

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…)