OpenSource Usability Labs

In September / October we asked Tine 2.0 users to answer a couple of questions. A fabulous number of about 120 users actually did finish the study. First of all: A big “THANK YOU” for doing this. As you know Tine 2.0 is Free Software and we are only doing it for you – our users. So we are very keen to hear your opinions. This is the only way to make Tine 2.0 better and better! So if you have any suggestions how we could reach even more users with our next survey, please add a comment below.

The first and most important result: For the first time we reached all our Usability goals with Tine 2.0!

Read on to get the whole picture.

(more…)

Just a quick note, that we started a new user survey for Tine 2.0. And you should participate!

You can find more information about it in the Tine 2.0 forum (in English or in German).

In April 2011 we ran a quick survey regarding time tracking in Tine 2.0 — thanks to the great community for spreading the links and to everyone taking 5 minutes to answer our questions!

We don’t want to bore you with a lengthy discussion of all the available statistics, but instead give you an overview of the most interesting results.

One of our concerns was the actually used number of Timeaccounts within an installation of Tine 2.0. The aggregated results indicate that we need to support the complete variety – from only a handful to more than 50 Timeaccounts. This surely sounds like a challenge to any user experience architect but, contrary to our expectations, the comments imply that users currently do not face any serious problems selecting the appropriate Timeaccount.

Regarding the length of a single task that is entered into the Timetracker we found a quite surprising pattern: Most of users’ tasks are either between 15 minutes and 2 hours; or up to one or more days. We’ll have to see how to tackle this in any upcoming changes to the interface.

We also gathered some popular or recurring feature requests from the forums and bugtracker and let users prioritize these according to their personal preference. Aggregating these personal priorities results in a nice graph that shows which features are important to most users:

A quick entry of Timesheets is the most important “feature” that we have to tackle in the next iteration of the Timetracker. Furthermore the assignment of Timesheets to Tasks and vice versa is a very popular idea that we haven’t found a solution for, yet. The same applies for repeating tasks, e.g. holidays or tasks that take more than one day. We already have a couple of ideas for indications of deviations from a standard work time and a better overview within the application, but according to the survey there are more important features.

Regarding a stop watch feature, that would allow users to press a button when starting and stopping a task, we can conclude that there is much disagreement between users. There is a small group of users that highly want this feature and others that do not need it at all. As you can see from the graph the majority of users would probably not benefit from that this feature.

So, that’s it — curious where the future development of Tine 2.0 is heading? Interested in a deeper analysis?

Discuss with us in the comments!

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!

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 all for the great participation in the challenge… As we hoped everyone would have some fun, there still is a serious goal behind it: Defining the new frame for Tine 2.0 and getting you – our users – into the boat. So now we have come up with what we would call the final prototype. Final in terms of: if you do not find anything bothering you and telling us so, we will start to implement it.

More information?

Find the whole challenge here

Find the final prototype here

Please comment in the Tine 2.0 Forum on this and rather not in my blog – so we only have one discussion!

We always try our new paths in user participation in the development of Tine 2.0. Inspired by the great ideas Thasmo had in our forum, we decided that we want to try to integrate our users even more into the process of re-designing the Tine 2.0 applications-frame. So we ask you to provide and discuss ideas with us and the other users. Please have a look at our

Tine 2.0 community mock-up challenge.

Have fun!

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…)

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)