OpenSource Usability Labs

LinuxTag 2010, anybody?

We invite you to take part in an informal meeting to share thoughts, experiences and other information covering the topics Usability and User Experience in the Free Software world. The meeting is organized by Björn from OpenUsability.org and Christoph from the OpenOffice.org User Experience Team.

You should join if you are interested in:

• Integrating User Centered Development into the development of your FOSS project
• Wanting to add your UX expertize to a FOSS project
• Wondering how to take benefits out of community work with real users
• Some usability tips for your FOSS project
• …

We are looking forward to see you at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany!

Go ahead and find more information on the Informal Meeting Wiki page.

Cheers,
Björn

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!

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 planned it for the Linux-Tag, but then there wasn’t a good Internet connection -

So we ask you now: Which are the best icons for Tine?

Please take part in this very short test where we would like to find out which icon fits best for some of the Tine parts like “Ressources” or “Today”.

To help us make Tine 2.0 even more user friendly, please click here and choose you preferred language:

http://tiny.cc/icontest

Plus: Calendar testers needed!

We still need testers for our Usability test in two weeks. If you live in Berlin, or happen to be there in two weeks, please give me a shout at: tine.calendar@gmail.com

We are looking for Tine-experienced people but newbies are also great.

The test itself will take place in Kreuzberg for about an hour and your effort will be rewarded, of course.

Thank you very much!

Today I found an article by Sam Dean who asks for a Centralized, State-of-the-Art Open Source Usability Lab. He refers to a cnet article by Matt Asay in which he postulates what Open Source can learn from Apple. Both articles point out that there is need for a shifting view in Open Source. Open Source needs to be more user-driven and less developer-centric - in other words there is a need for usability in Open Source work.

Well, there are good and bad news for both of them:
It is not as easy as they think but we have already come much further than they think!

To explain this I would like to clarify some myths on Open Source Usability:

Usability plays no role in Open Source development.

The OpenUsability.org initiative has provided Usability guidance to hundreds of Open Source projects for more than 5 years. We have worked with various  projects from big ones like Wikipedia or KDE to very small ones. Many projects have developed their own Usability-Community like the OpenOffice Renaissance or the KDE Usability project. Celeste Paul - one of the members of OpenUsability and KDE Usability - has just recently been elected into the KDE e.V. board.

So there is a community willing to assist Open Source projects on the user front and their work is been widely accepted.

Additionally our service, the OpenSource Usability Labs,  provides professional usability support to commercial Open-Source projects and traditional usability companys have detected Open-Source as a market by now.

Commercial Software always has a better Usability than Open Source Software.

First of all: the quality in commercial software varies as much as in open source. There are products with excellent usability around and there is just the opposite. In both cases the bad products die sooner or later.

So what we need to think about is: “What is possible for Usability in Open Source development?”

There are numerous Open Source projects around that provide excellent usability. Firefox challenges the Microsoft Internet Explorer. Think of projects like gallery, KDE4 or Tine2.0. All have undergone rewrites in order to enhance their usability and all have proven to be successful in relation to the age of the project.

So there is prove that Open Source projects are capable of a really good user experience.

Open-source software ends up being written for other developers.

This argument used to be true. Back in those good old days Open Source was successful, because developers could directly influence and change the software. If the software did not match their needs, they simply took the code and changed whatever they did not like. Projects split up, died, new ones were started - they evoluted. And by this they also evoluted a perfect usability - perfect for software developers which happened to be the main target group. In other words: those products evoluted perfect usability.

Nowadays that the user-base shifts, the goals in development differentiate. Projects that need to be used by average Joes and Janes build up user-feedback channels, integrate usability experts into the development and do regular user testing. They get designed for the average Joes and Janes.

Usability is a matter of a centralized lab.

This is actually not a special Open Source myth, but it is nevertheless wrong. Good usability can only be reached through a user-centric development process. A lab can be very handy during this process, but it is not the backbone. Usability experts need to be tightly integrated into the processes - from the definition of requirements, the evaluation of user goal, setting the information architecture to actually testing the products.

This is possible even in those distributed  and self-motivated development-teams you usually find in Open-Source projects. By tying it all into a single, centralized lab, as Sam Dean suggests, you would loose the strengths of this distributed development - just think of the requirements arising from different cultural needs.

Even more: Open-Source software is much more capable to integrate their users then a single lab would allow. Our experience is that Open-Source user are very willing to give feedback to the developers. While customers of commercial projects often ask: “What do I get, when I contribute?”, Open-Source users feel it is a good chance to say “Thank you” to the developers for providing a great piece of software.

By collaborating via the Internet it is not only a dream to activate this potential - it is reality. For example, we have just started an Icon Usability-Test for the new Oxygen k3b-Icons and we got more then 2000 participants within just 2 days.

Summing it up

The evolutionary process that stands behind Open Source development has already adopted to the idea of user centric development. Just as it will adopt to any other upcoming need in software development. And Usability on the other hand has started to understand the needs and the potentials of the Open Source idea, and makes great advances in activating them for the good of the projects.

For sure we are just at the beginning of a long journey. But we are already on the road. Articles like the ones from Sam and Matt show the increasing public demand for more usable Open Source products. I am sure the community notices these signals and will just speed up. The foundations are being laid…

Anne and I will be at the LinuxTag in Berlin. Hope it will be as much fun as in the last years!

The plans are at the moment that at least one of us will be there on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, as well as Friday the whole day. We will be mainly at the Tine 2.0 booth (Halle 7.2a Stand 102a). You will have the possibility to participate in a small Icon-Usabilitytest to identify the best icons for the new Tine calender-app there!

We are looking forward to discuss any issue with you concerning the Usability of Tine 2.0 or any other Open Source Software.

I am very happy that Anne decided to join the Tine 2.0 Team. Anne studies international media informatics at the FHTW Berlin. She is doing her bachelor work on the Tine 2.0 calendar. In this scope she will analyse personas and use-cases for the calendar as well as other existing calendars. She will develop the interaction- and interface-design and do some surveys and usability-tests. Of course she will regularly blog about her work.

Welcome, Anne!

Seeing the upcoming surveys: if you haven’t registered for participating in these tests yet, you shouldn’t wait any longer. This is your chance to feedback on the Tine 2.0 calendar and other Tine 2.0 development! Also feel invited to discuss any issue on the calendar in our forum!

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.

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!

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!