OpenSource Usability Labs

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?

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This summer I participated in the SoU project with Gallery, the open source photo sharing software. The broad goal of the project was to conduct a survey to learn more about Gallery’s users in moving toward the release of the 3rd version of the software. The project was a success in terms of garnering useful data for Gallery, but, importantly, it was an incredibly valuable learning experience for me.

As a student working towards a masters in Human-Computer Interaction, I have learned about and conducted user research and usability studies in my coursework. But, what SoU provided me that no school project ever could was the opportunity to engage in research that has an actual impact on improving a product— and the opportunity to experience all the challenges that go along with that.

At the start of the project, I have to say I was a bit overwhelmed with what direction to take, but with the guidance of Björn as my mentor, the help of Jakob, a former SoU student who continues to work on the Gallery project, and the awesome tools of Usability-Methods.com, I soon found my way. Here are some of the lessons I learned along the way.

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Thank you for taking the time answer our survey!
We had a great outcome with a total of 365 successfully completed surveys and 106 partially finished ones.

A few things that came out that you might find interesting:

• Overall, 346 people took the survey in German, 68 in English
• 30% were women, 70% were men
• on average, people were 31 years old
• 85% come from Germany, 10% from the Rest of Europe, the remaining 5% are from other parts of the world including China and South Africa (!)
• Professional appointments: women mostly use papercalendars (65%) and locally installed calendar applications (44%), men mostly use locally installed calendar applications (54%) and Smartphone calendars (46%)
• Private appointments: women mostly use paper calendars (83%) and locally installed calendar applications (24%), men mostly use Smartphone calendars (49%) and locally installed calendar applications (45%)
• The calendar application used the most is Microsoft Outlook (45%) followed by others (25%) and eGroupware (23%)
• 43% of all people asked use a smartphone, the biggest smartphone brand being Nokia (30%) followed by Apple iPhone/iPod touch (27%)
• 1/3 of smartphone users synchronize daily between phone and computer
• Per week, 3/4 of all respondents make one or no all day appointment, 2-10 appointments shorter than one day, none with international partners and 1-5 recurring appointments
• Half of all people who answered don’t make any multi-day appointments per week
• Nearly half of all people (45%) don’t make any public appointments, while 2/3 of them make 2-5 private appointments per week
• Nearly two thirds (65%) of the people asked find it very important or important to include tasks and milestones into their calendar
• Slightly more than two thirds of all respondents find it very important or important to make appointments distinguishable by colour
• But there no noticeable tendency when it comes to accessing other calendars to coordinate appointments: 39% say, that this is absolutely not important or not important to them, while 34% say the opposite. 20% are inbetween, though.
• An clear majority of everyone (86%) who answered wants to have a “quick save possibility”, with start (98%), name (92%), place (67%) and end (58%) being the most important information for creating an appointment.
• As for the calendar view, people considered the week view to be the most important one followed by the day view.
• Also, Pop-Up seems to be the most favourite way of all the respondents to be reminded of an appointment, 2/3 (67%) voted for that, followed by sound signal (48%).
• And for the last question: As you can see in the picture below, synchronization is what people miss most in their current calendar, followed by reminders and groupware functionality:

If you have any questions regarding the survey, please ask!

We need your answers!

Please take 10 minutes to answer a few questions about how you use calendars.

All answers will be used to make the new Tine calendar fit everbody’s needs perfectly!

The survey is in two languages:

English version: http://tiny.cc/calendarsurvey_en

German version: http://tiny.cc/calendarsurvey_de

We really appreciate your contribution.