In anticipation of the new Tine 2.0 version Mialena which is scheduled for March 2010 I’d like to show you a sneak preview about the new file upload features.
Tine 2.0 is now able to upload multiple files at once. Additionally Files can be uploaded from directly out of the operating systems file manager or desktop using drag & drop.
Being an open source project, it’s extremely important for us to chose freely available standard technologies. Therefore it has to to be emphasized, that these new features run in FF, Chrome and Safari without any additional plugins.
This service release fixes some minor bugs. Have a look at the changelog to see which issues have been addressed.
We are at the moment working on the new mainscreen layout, implementing some calendar improvements and tuning the email client. A beta version of the next release should be available in two or three weeks.
For laymen, users and experts, the "Chemnitzer Linux-Tage" from 13th to 14th March present information around the topics Linux and Open Source.
The development team of Tine 2.0 "Open Source Groupware and CRM" will be available with an own project booth for presenting the software and to give information about the current project state.
Moreover, a talk about the particular usability of Tine 2.0 will be given by Lars Kneschke, Team Leader Business Solutions at Metaways Infosystems GmbH.
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.
Today I closed the 2nd KMail icon test. This time 1945 people took part. Much less people than the last time, but also the drop-out was much less than last time.
Most of the participants are strong KDE users. More than 80% use KDE very frequently. Next is Windows (TM) with more than 25% of frequent users, GNome with about 10% and Mac OS (TM) with about 7%.
The participants are almost half split in their use of KMail, more than 50% use KMail frequently and about 30% say they never use KMail (the rest in somewhere in between).
In this test we included the icons of two elements of KMail: The icons used in the window and in the message menu of the composer window. These are icons of different size in the standard configuration of KDE, so we presented the icons in the according size and used the KUbuntu translations of the terms associated with them. The overall findings are very good. Most icon-term-relations seem to work out fine. We did not find find any explicitly not working relations, but some still show the potential for improvement.
Icon-Term relations working really well
The following icon-term relations seem to work well. You have to consider that users had to pick from only 8 choices this time, so it was much easier to exclude all the less fitting icons to find the one to choose. But the data of none of the following icons showed any evidence for this.
Best Icon
Rating
Term
10,0
Send Later (message menu)
10,0
Print (message menu)
10,0
Close (message menu)
10,0
Attach File (Composer)
10,0
Cut (Composer)
9,8
Encrypt Message (Composer)
9,8
Sign Message (Composer)
9,0
Copy (Composer)
9,0
New Main Window (message menu)
9,0
Paste (Composer)
9,0
Send Later Via (Composer)
8,6
Save as Draft (message menu)
Note that the icons for “cut” and “copy” were quite often mixed up
Icon-Term relations with some room for improvements
For the following term the icons could be improved. There was quite a high missing value for these icons and the icons got associated with some of the other terms. Also the time people took to spot these icons was quite high, which shows that people just chose the best of the not-so-well-fitting icons, not a convincing icon.
Best Icon
Rating
Term
8,0
Send Mail (message menu)
7,8
Send Mail Via (Composer)
7,4
New Composer (message menu)
6,8
Insert File… (message menu)
It is interesting to see that the stamp does not work out well for “sending mails”.
Some closing notes…
We are still looking for people to help to translate the test into different languages. Also people wanting to help setting up these icon tests are warmly welcome, as my time is very limited and I do not get to publish new tests and the results as often as I would like to… And of course anyone interested in investigating the results in greater depth is warmly welcome. Just drop me a mail…
This service release fixes some minor bugs. Have a look at the changelog to see which issues have been addressed.
If you like, you can join the exciting discussion about the upcoming mock-up changes in our forum.
Additionally, we plan to provide packages of the first milestone of the next release in a few days. It comes with drag & drop of contacts, leads and tasks, a new map panel in the addressbook and copy functionality for records. stay tuned!
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!
It is great to see how many people participated in the first icon test for KMail: 3327 started the test and 2399 finished. This is a drop-out of about 28% across the whole study and fairly good for this kind of study - especially seeing the technical difficulties we had when we started the study.
It is great to see that we got sufficient participants for reliable results in all languages!
As you might know, our test combines multiple indicators and calculates a single value for each icon-term relationship. The maximum value an icon-term-relation can reach is 10,0. Following I split up the results into 3 groups:
1. Icons working really well
All of the following icon-term-relationships show average values above 8 with no individual value below 7 for any language. We can assume all these icons to work well enough in all tested languages.
Icon
Rating
Term
10,0
Print
10,0
Previous
10,0
Trash
9,6
Open Full Search
9,2
Next
9,2
Open a new tab
9
Reply
8,8
Create To-do
8,2
Change Sort Order
8,2
Select View Appearance (Theme)
8,2
New message
2. Terms with no working Icons
For the following terms no fitting icons were identified. They definitely need to be redone.
Best Icon
Rating
Term
4,4
Select aggregation mode
4,2
Templates
4,0
Sent-mail
3,2
Filter by Status
3. Icons that need some attention
For the following terms the icons show to be the best, but only in comparison to what was presented. They could not convince. The results here need to be further examined and icons should be discussed and - if needed - improved.
Best Icon
Rating
Term
7,8
Outbox
6,8
Forward
6,2
Inbox
6,2
Drafts
5,6
Check mail
Note that for Inbox and Check mail the same icon won. There is the same problem with Sent-mail and Outbox. These concepts are obviously not correctly differentiated by the users.
Some cultural notes
With these studies we also want to learn about cultural differences and their impact on the quality of icons. So here are some interesting facts found in the results - perhaps some native speakers can help to understand why…
Reply
While this icon was well understood in most languages Spanish (’Responder’) and Polish (’Odpowiedź’) speakers had much bigger troubles with this icon.
Forward
Only German speakers (’Weiterleiten’)understood this icon really well - all other had much bigger difficulties.
Drafts
Only Spanish speakers (’borrador’) understood this icon really well.
Create To-do
Spanish speakers (’Crear tarea pendiente’) had much more problems with this icon.
Should anyone need the results in greater detail, please let me know. Under certain circumstances, I can make it possible to directly access the results. I planned to start the next test before christmas, but I won’t manage to do so. But we will definitely have Italian available then, and perhaps also Norwegian… Wishing all of you a happy christmas!
We spent the last week fixing minor bugs and glitches in the current August release and are proud to say that Tine 2.0 now is more stable than ever. Google Chrome support has been improved and a new language (norwegian) has been added.
Just hop over to the download area and get your new version today!
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
It is really great to see how many of you already took part in our KMail-Icon-Test. A lot of questions arrived my by mail or in my blog, so I thought I would just explain a little about testing icons…
We do this testing, because icons are useful and beautiful - they save place and people can recognize them faster than they can read text. Practically icons work via a visual-metaphor. If that metaphor, however, is not understood by the user, the icon does not work out. One can easily realize, that it will be much easier to find a visual metaphor for “save” than for “save as” or even more complex or abstract computer actions.
With the tests we mainly want to answer two questions:
We only have limited resources. Now we want to work on some new icons - but which icons should we work on?
We want KDE SC to be usefull for everyone in the world. So, do our icons and our terms work for everyone in the world?
The icon test finds indicators for answering these questions, by asking you - the user - to allocate icons and terms. We can measure how well icons and terms match. And we can also do this individually for any language the study runs in (so we get the world answer). Technically we have found a lot of indicators for the quality of icons, that focus on explicit or ambiguous allocations of icons, missing icons and time spent to actually decide for an icon. All these indicators help us to answer the above questions.
So this is a method mainly for evaluation and no not for finding inspiration. But still, this is not absolutely true. Some people complained about not offering a “no icon fits”-button. There are two things to say about this:
The evaluative result is the same - whether we offer the “no icon fits”-button or not - and whether people read instruction to skip a term or not. To assure this we us a multiple indicators approach.
The inspirational result is worse when we offer an explicit “no icon fits”-button, because we do not get the idea about approaches to the visualisation of that term. Typically you do not get a random result if a term has no well corresponding icon. You do get some icons that drop out and you can try to understand why. So you might just find ideas about how to construct the metaphor for that missing icon.
So we will continue to explain that a term can be skipped, but we will not offer a “no icon fits”-button.
There have also been some complains about the terms, missing context and the sense of life. Well, it’s not always sunshine. Testing typically means not being “real”. In other words: Testing always has some restrictions. With the icon test we focus on the association between the icon and a corresponding term. If the term is rubbish, the icon has no chance. As terms for our KDE SC icon tests we use the labels next to the icons or tool-tips of the icons (if no label is around) you can find in the application. We tell the participants that they can find these icons in the context of a certain application - this time KMail.
And, as I mentioned above, we can compare the results of different groups. May it be the spanish speaking people with the Windows(TM)-only users. Thus we can thoroughly investigate the relationship between icon and term. And we think the indicators we get are much better than no indicators, and we are well aware of the existing restrictions. You can find a sample result of an icon-test here.
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 accompanying the beta phase show, that about 90% of you think it is a good idea from us to integrate these surveys on the welcome screen. And: as we are listing to our users, we have included a possibility for admins to disable this feature (about 55% wanted this). Now I can only call on you: please leave this option on! Yes, we are calling home, but we do this before the user is logged on, so no harm can happen - and: hey, the source code is open, check it yourself! The second best thing you can do to support Tine 2.0 is, next to using it, to allow your users to participate in these surveys. It is a great opportunity to have Tine 2.0 fit your personal needs and the needs of the group you are working with in the future even better.
And as always, we asked for your rating and use of Tine 2.0 and its components. Now this is the Tine 2.0 hit-list:
Component
Used by % of users
Rating (1:excellent - 7:needs improvements)
Tine 2.0 in general
100%
2,56
Addressbook
100%
2,62
Calendar
92%
2,61
Admin
92%
3,13
E-Mail
87%
3,67
Tasks
72%
3,28
Activesync
68%
3,71
CRM
50%
4,08
Timesheets
40%
3,7
Phone
20%
3,8
Sales
20%
5
Classes
17%
4,75
Voipmanager
12%
5
It is great to see, that we already reached great values for most of the main components of Tine 2.0.
Some other brief findings:
our community is growing. More than 60% of the answers came from rather new users of Tine 2.0. I think that is a great success.
more than 80% want to participate in the survey again. Thanks to all the others for trying. Perhaps you could give us an idea how we can win your will for participation?
About 70% of you have made such good experiences with Tine 2.0 and our test-driven development, that you either already did install the beta or were planning to install the new Tine 2.0 version immediately after the release.
If you like comment on anything, need more results or have ideas how we can improve the surveys, feel free to comment in the Tine 2.0 forum or in my blog.
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