OpenSource Usability Labs

Kontact Mobile is a free email and PIM client (calender, tasks, addresses, notes – also suitable as groupware front-end, e.g. for a Kolab server) for mobile phones. Using Qt allows us to have this software running on different platforms.

On the base of your tremendous feedback in the past we have worked hard on improving Kontact mobile even further.  At the moment Kontact Mobile is running well on Maemo – and Windows Mobile 6.5 is next on our list.

Feel free, test it and provide feedback!

Interested?

1. Download Kontact Mobile: Maemo (Nokia N900); Windows Mobile 6.5 (e.g. HTC Touch Pro 2)
2. Read our instructions and start testing
3. Give feedback until the 5th of November 2010 (anonymous – no registration needed)

This testing period will run for one week (ending Friday the 5th of November).

On the current state of Kontact Mobile for Maemo 5:

We have a solid beta version. Everything should be working, we are perhaps still a bit slow (working on that). And we really want to know how you feel about it!

On the current state of Kontact Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.5:

We have only been testing on HTC Touch Pro 2, but it should be working on other Windows Mobile 6.5 phones as well. Everything seems to be running – although it can be slow, so please be patient. We also know of occasional crashes – but without loosing data or doing greater harm than having to restart the device. If you encounter bugs, please report them. We will try to provide a newer and better version as soon as possible. We will announce availability of new packages here.

More info on the project:

The foundation of this project is the Kontact PIM suite. Kontact is an excellent team player with the Kolab Groupware server and has been developed within the KDE project. It has proven stability and reliability for years. We are now porting this suite to a couple of mobile platforms. The project is free software. So we invite you to give us your opinion on the state we have reached in order to make this piece of free software even better. If you like to get up-to-date information, please join our mailinglist.

Thanks a lot for your contribution!

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.

We were in the lucky situation to conduct a usability-test with seven volunteers of a German company. They are using Tine 2.0 mainly as CRM-Tool to coordinate their sales-department. Consequently they are using contacts, CRM and tasks, but not the other apps of Tine 2.0. All user were regular, but not frequent users of Tine 2.0 and moderately comfortable with computers in general.

The tests were concepted as semi-structured, task-oriented interviews. I lead all interviews, while Conny Weiß was participating as an active observer. He was allowed to ask and answer any questions during the interview.

The scenario was as follows:

1. Users had to log-in and explain their general impressions and understanding of Tine 2.0.
2. Users had to find and modify an existing contact. Focus of this task was the use of the filter-system as a quick-filter, the short-view of a contact and the modification of an item.
3. Users then had to export a list of contacts to .pdf, that had to be composed by a rather complex filter-setting.
4. Next they were asked to create a to-do-list which only a certain group of people was allowed to see.
5. Finally they were asked to show how they manage a typical task of their daily work with Tine 2.0.

The interviews were very informative. The results were aggregated and transformed into tasks for further development. The detailed results can be found in the bug-tracking-systems of Tine 2.0. Following I will give an overview of the most important findings:

1. General understanding of Tine 2.0 is good
   All users were able to explain the general concepts of Tine 2.0 and were competent to solve even complex tasks. This encourages us to stay with the chosen general approach of Tine 2.0, namely keeping the general screen-estate, the filter-list-view, the application-pile etc.
2. Sometimes Tine 2.0 gets in the users’ way
   In some details Tine 2.0 is not enough consistent, predictive or supportive for the user. We have found heaps of these small Usability-Bugs, showing us that we have to be even more precise with all those little things. Examples for this category are:
   * The addressbook-container has not been correctly pre-selected when adding a new contact
   * Some wording was not understood
   * Not sufficient feedback when filtering caused no results
   * Number of elements in lists are not configurable
   * …
3. Notes should be editable
   The concept of notes was appreciated by the users, but they wanted notes to be editable and they wanted notes to show up at more then one place.
4. No connection between CRM and Tasks
   Users had the problem that they cannot see which CRM-Lead a certain task belongs to.
5. Use of Right-Mouse-Buttons is confusing
   Users were not able to predict where and how they could use the right-mouse-button-menu.
6. Selection of a person is confusing
   The dialogue to select e.g. the responsible person for a task lead to some irritation for the user.

This is just a short summary of the most important findings. A lot of the issues have already been fixed for the upcoming Tine 2.0 Lara release. All other issues are integrated into the further development schedule.

Summing it up: the user test was well worth it and helped us a lot to loose our expert view and once again see Tine 2.0 through the eyes of a “normal user”.

We want you – for Tine 2.0:

If you are interested to support Tine 2.0 development, then join our mailing list for voluntary usability-testers. Your help is very much appreciated and taking part in these tests only takes a little time and is fun! Take a look at our Icon Test demo to get a feeling what these usability-tests could look like.