OpenSource Usability Labs

I have decided to provide some hints how to efficiently work with Tine. And I will do this as a series of blog posts within the next time, accompanying the upcoming spring 2009 release of Tine. Let us start with

Question #1: If Tine 2.0 is so usable, why is there a need for a tutorial?

Tine has been developed with a strong focus on usability. Usability experts and interaction designer have been integrated into the development from day 1 on. We regularly conduct usability tests to improve the product even further. Nevertheless usable does not equal simple or easy to learn. Both attributes are important aspects of a usable product – and of course we try to make Tine as simple and easy to learn as possible. But these attributes are not the foremost criteria for optimizing the user-experience of Tine.

When setting the scope for Tine we have decided that interactions and dialogues of Tine should always be

1. enjoyable – Tine is designed to be fun to use. So everyone should like to use Tine.
2. efficient – Working with Tine must always be efficient. Tine should never come into your way.

In opposite you can say Tine does not maximize the power for a first-time-user. We do not try to oversimplify the rather complex process of a groupware: different, cross-depending applications, a very detailed rights-management,…

So there is a need for some tips how to work efficiently with Tine. These will follow in later posts and hopefully help you to enjoy business collaboration with Tine even more!

Our family of companies (OpenSource-Usability-Labs, Apliki and binaere bauten) has finally moved from eGroupware to Tine 2.0 as our leading groupware system. Only for the in Tine 2.0 still missing calender we continue to use the eGroupware calendar.

I was quite nervous promoting and pushing the decision to do so. The dialogues and workflows of Tine show to a very great extent my handwriting. Therefore everything that does not yet work as expected falls back on me. And one thing is for sure: Tine 2.0 is still a young project, having many bugs and lacking features at this point of time.

So why did I promote the change? First of all I was always very unhappy about eGroupware. It is feature rich, but – many complex technical product have this problem – most users could not use more than perhaps 20% of these features. We had eGroupware running for more than 2 years now – still whenever I talked to Conny or Lars telling them that I failed to do this or that with eGroupware the answer was always the same: It is possible. Just this did not help me in my daily life. So in my eyes the lacking features of Tine 2.0 compared to eGroupware are to a great extent only virtually missing, because for the normal user eGroupware is not feature-rich, it is confusing.

The second reason to change to Tine 2.0 in productive use is of course to get feedback. I am in charge for the usability part of the development – but until now we did not have the chance to actually test the concepts we have thought out. So now is the time to get back to earth and see whether things work out the way we hope. Next to using Tine 2.0 ourselves, we will start doing active usability testing from February on.

So what is my intermediate result after about 3 weeks of active Tine usage?

Honestly, I am overwhelmed. There are a lot of bugs. To a great extent these are not severe bugs – they just get in your ways here and there – but hey: we are working on a development snapshot. What should one expect? But the integration of different aspects of groupware is just great. The filter-list-system is working well (of course: it still needs a little polishing). Still more than this: Using Tine is just fun. Working with eGroupware I always felt like: ok, this is the application we use, so teeth together and do what you need to do. So I always did what I really had to do, but never more than that. With Tine 2.0 it is just the opposite. I really enjoy working with Tine. I have caught myself just playing around with Tine, exploring the possibilities. This way I did what is most important for a groupware: I used it. I put all the information in Tine that never found their way into eGroupware.

Summing it up: except for the painfully missing calendar, I think Tine 2.0 is a great groupware. It has less features than eGroupware, but overcompensates this by being straight forward and fun to use. The decision to change from eGroupware to Tine 2.0 was a good one! I hope the usability tests we conduct in the next time will confirm this picture.

Last week we had a closer look at the filter settings for Tine 2.0. Filters are a central part of the user interface concept, because interacting with Tine 2.0 follows a clear structure:

1. John picks the sub-app, e.g. Contacts he wants and needs.
2. He then gets a list of available item, which he needs to narrow down.
3. He identifies the item he was looking for and is doing some action with it.

This workflow is true for almost all kinds of sub applications. Filters come in play in step 2. Here John needs some easy way to narrow down the list of items. We want to achieve this by the use of a strong and still easy to use set of filters. Take a look at a working draft of how these filters could look like:

The operator in the middle will be only active, when it is needed, e.g. for narrowing down dates or postal codes, so it does not come into John’s way when he uses <TAB> for navigating.

In the default view John will see only one filter line showing a quickfilter. This would be

[Contact|V] contains [____________________]

for address book. This way he always has a one-click search-like filter setting available for doing the 95% of the searches he needs to do. Still, the other 5%, where John needs to do a complex filtering are available just as easy!

One the fascinating ideas of this concept is the possibility to save these complex, but powerful and often needed filter sets. So John can do frequent searches with one click faster then ever before! And there is no limit to individualisation. Susan, Paul and James can define and access their most needed tasks this way. Tine 2.0 will be just right and powerful for all of them – and for you!

Only one week left to LinuxTag in Berlin (28th to 31st of May)! It is always a great event and I am looking forward to meet all the great people that are engaged in the OpenSource community! And of course I am personally happy that this event has settled in Berlin – and I do not need to travel for it anymore

Unfortunately the OpenSource Usability Labs will – this year – not have there own booth on LinuxTag. But you will find me most of the time at the Tine 2.0 booth. It is located in hall 7.2a booth no. 115.

I am very happy to get feedback on the ideas we can present up to now with Tine 2.0. Feel free to discuss the concepts in User-Interface- and User-Interaction-Design with me. As well I am looking forward to discuss any issues related to usability in OpenSource in general – be it in the scope of the OpenUsability-Initiative or a matter of the OpenSource Usability Labs.

See you on LinuxTag!