OpenSource Usability Labs

… I would be very happy to talk to you!

My interest is to find out how to make better use out of the users of a software. If you are interested what this could mean for you, join me on a BoF or simply ask me when you see me, e.g. on the pre-registration event tonight

I am looking forward to my first:

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.

There are many directions for the Tine 2.0 development we are discussing at the moment. But in the good tradition of our development we really want to know what you – our users and potential user – want us to do. So we decided to start a short survey and kindly ask you to participate – it will cost you less then 5 minutes and helps you and us to make Tine 2.0 the most rocking groupware around!

Tine 2.0 user survey

(The survey is powered by usability-methods.com)

I want to thank everyone who was interested in taking part in the Usability calendar tests. Unfortunately I could only invite people from Berlin, because the tests had to be conducted in person. So a special thanks to all the testers that came!

In the test I focused on the Tine 2.0 calendar. The tasks included creating a shared calendar, creating whole day and recurring events, inviting, copying data from the address book to the description of an event, accepting an invitation and moving an appointment to another calendar.

These are the top 5 problems the testers had:

1. For moving an appointment to another calendar, nearly everyone tried to drag and drop this appointment. (#1460 in the Bugtracker)
2. When inviting people, 2/3 of the testers expected to find the accounts, they shared the calendar with, to be first in the invitation menu. (#1522)
3. When creating a recurring event, 2/3 of all testers found “Every 1. month” irritating. A proposal for redesign is attached to the issue in the Bugtracker. (#1524)
4. Accepting or declinig an invitation is not obvious and fast enough. Two thirds of everyone struggled to complete the task. They couldn’t find said invitation without knowing at which day it was and then didn’t expect to have to open the Edit window to accept. (#1440)
5. When copying data from the business card area in the address book, more than half of all testers tried highlighting and then right clicking to copy. This didn’t work. (#1422)

Including the above problems there will be a priority list handed over to the great guys at Metaways and we’ll hopefully see most of the things already included in the next release of Tine 2.0.

If you have questions, please email me or write a comment.

To the nearly 200 (173, to be exact) participants in our icon test: Thank you all for taking part! We got great results in terms of the quality of the Tine 2.0 icons (which are, in fact from the Oxygen Iconset). Also, we would like to thank you for all the comments you gave: Many of them were really encouraging, we got many compliments, but also some valuable criticism and tipps.

How did the icon test work?

We not only recorded which icons were chosen for which terms, but also how long it took you to decide.

From that, we could calculate three values:

• “Strength of association” (Indicates what percentage of the users assigned this icon with this term.),
• “Discriminatory power” (Indicates wether and how often this icon was assigned to other terms as well.) and
• “Conspicuity” (Indicates how fast the icon was chosen by the user in proportion to the average.)

In the pictures below you can find the three values on the left in the above order. The three values together give an overall Rating between 0 and 10. After a few tests we conducted, we can say that only icons with a rating above 8 can be seen as perfect for a term.

What is very apparent in all the results: The Oxygen Icons are not made for Tine! From the few terms we wanted to find the perfect icon for, only “User” got a rating above 8:

The weakest rating was achieved for “Today”, which is very interesting, because I expected this to be the most evident one:

Here are the results of all the other terms:

Add Appointment:

Add Calendar:

And Resource:

What do we learn from that?

First of all, we need icons that fit better to the special Tine 2.0 terms. Of course, the Oxygen Icons are a great start, but they just don’t fit all of our needs.

That’s why we want you, our community, to contribute!

• If you use Tine 2.0 and you see an icon which you think doesn’t fit: Tell us!
• If you are an icon designer and love to play with pixels: We need you!
• If you know how to visualize complicated things with as little complexity as possible: Write us!
• And even if you just know someone of the above (or know someone that knows someone , we would like to hear from you!

Please write your ideas and suggestions to: tine.calendar@gmail.com or post in the Tine forum.

The Icon Usability Test of the TV-Browser icons has been closed for some time now. We have been busy learning from that study and working on further improvements for the icon test. So I totally forgot to write about the actual results…

Just as a reminder – the aim of the study was twofold:

First, we wanted to prove the method, which worked very well and we are going to publish the results in some scientific magazine sometime.

The second goal was to reveal the good and the not so good icons in TV-Browser. For the test we used some icons that are visible in TV-Browser and the tool-tips provided for them. We then asked the user of TV-Browser (they should be used to the icons!) to attend the survey – and they did indeed! A great “Thank you” to all of you who have participated!

And these are the results in short:

The following icons proved to be just great and really helpful for the user:

Print, Reminder Function, Favorite program, Search, Filter

A second set of icons worked alright, but has the potential to be improved:

List of currently running programs, Simple marker plug in

And finally some icons showed the definite necessity for an improvement:

Start external Program, Tool for translators, Get recent TV listings, Rate program

Now we are working on an second study, in which we will test alternative icons for those last functions. In this study we are going to present alterative icons to the users, which then have to pick the icons that fit best for he function. At last we are going to test the new set of icons to prove the improvement, that we hopefully will have achieved by then!

Next to TV-Browser, we are also working on a study for the testing of Tine 2.0 icons. Hopefully I will be back to you with some news on that issues soon!