OpenSource Usability Labs

We just started a quick new survey for our ongoing project Tine 2.0.

Please help us gathering feedback on the application’s general development as well as capturing your habits of time tracking.

Take the survey now!

We have just finished another survey for Tine 2.0. Thanks to all participants for showing their support and helping us to make Tine 2.0 the best groupware around. We are very pleased to report that this survey — in terms of the number of participating users — has been the most successful so far.

After looking at the answers we conclude that the overall impression of Tine 2.0 is positive and seems to be improving over the different versions — a trend we hope to continue during the next releases. Users seem to appreciate the simplicity and general user interface provided by Tine 2.0.

We also realized that the Addressbook is one of the most used applications and that we need to be cautious about handling upcoming adjustments. We hope users will be willing to discuss possible user interfaces with us in the forum.

We have already put in some usability work into the Calendar application which — as the data of this survey suggests — has improved since the previous release of Tine 2.0. Sadly users perceive the Email client as one of the worst core applications. We are quite aware of the technical limitations and are just putting on the finishing touches to resolve these as well as to clean up the interface.

A lot of users rely on the Timetracker, but the feedback suggests that it still needs improvement. We hear you and promise to make this a higher priority — maybe someone is even interested in sponsoring the next iteration?

We greatly appreciate the comments we got during the survey. Overall it seems that most users are in need of proper connectivity support (CalDAV and WebDAV coming up!) and at least a basic document management system. From a usability perspective the overall speed of Tine 2.0 is also of concern. Until we can tackle this, administrators should have a look at this thread in the forum.

In other news we are still puzzling about how to reach even more end-user of Tine 2.0 in our surveys, i.e. someone like our Personas — Any ideas? Let us know in the comments!

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 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.

With the new version – Mialena – of Tine 2.0 out, it is time to take a look back at the feedback you provided to us in the past version.

As you know we ask you – our users on the log-in screen to participate in short surveys. They all have one common goal: to assess your impression of the quality of Tine 2.0. So, how do you like Tine 2.0?

The overall impression of Tine 2.0 is good (about 2.4 on a scale from 1 (excellent) to 7 (needs improvements)). The rating of the individual applications varies with addressbook and calendar leading with approximately the same value as the Tine 2.0 overall impression. The other important applications (Tasks, Email, Admin) follow, getting good to above average ratings while still leaving some room for improvements. Only sales, phone and voipmanager get below average ratings.

So, with Mialena we decided to improve the basic concepts in Tine 2.0 further. Most application now have a proper filter- and favorites concept. We hope this will better your impression of most of the applications. We also decided to move the navigation from the Outlook-like-app-pile to a modern Tab-interface. I am curious how you like this! We also spent some love to calender, email and syncing (my N900 now works fine!) – and of course some more which you should not hesitate to find out!

For a lot improvements we did your free comments inspired us a lot. We believe that we managed to fulfill about 50% of the free suggestions you made in Mialena now. So thanks for that input and keep on going like this. It really hepls us a lot to get even better!

We also asked you a couple of other questions about your context of use (mainly business, but also for other private purposes, managing between 1 and 800 users) and the necessity for a handbook (about 40% would like one) or seminars (about 25% would like one). Even though we need to get better in documentation on our wiki and other resources (so you told us!), most of the users are quite satisfied with the documentation and help they can already get.

So, please check out Mialena and continue to participate in our surveys – and in any other way you like. We desperately seeking for designer wanting to contribute to the look and feel (esp. icons need to be done), volunteers working on documentation and in the forum – or how would you like to participate in the Tine 2.0 development?

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?

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.