Introduction

In may 2013 we asked users about their preferences for file managers (FM). The online survey did not contain questions regarding Dolphin specifically, but addresses file managers in general to be able compare usability and user experience of different tools. Out of 1310 users that started the questionnaire, 749 finished the first part with questions about the When and What (42% drop-out) and 669 finished the second part with ratings on the chosen file manager (10% drop out). The last part with demographics was finished by 651 probands (2% drop-out).

First results

Most participants (56%) use Dolphin (which is KDE’s default), followed by Nautilus (10%), CLI (8%), Thunar (5%), Konqueror (4%), and Krusader (3%). The predominance of KDE / Qt within the study is also shown  in one of the last questions about the OS. It’s a pity that we weren’t able to attract more users of other OS with the survey.

Results of the user study: Usage of file managers.

Two third of all users chose their FM deliberately. Most prioritize functionality (31%) and efficiency (18%). This result is according to developers expectations (cf. Quo vadis, Dolphin? Results from the developers study).

Results of the user study: Reasons to chose the FM.

And at a first glance the users are satisfied with their FM: 31 report low values (1 for displeased and 2) while 627 report high ratings (5 and 6 as fully satisfied).

Discussion

The rather high quote of drop-outs probably comes from to ‘strange’ questions and a more complex study design in contrast to simple ‘Like’ polls. The basic idea is that software in general is applied by a person (individual aspects were asked in the demographics section), in a certain situation, and with a specific purpose (both asked in the first part of the study). We admit that the particular situation in which a tool is being used, needs some reflection. Of course, FM’s are used to copy files, to add or remove folders, and to manage properties. But if you think about the situation in which you apply a tool you might come to the conclusion that sometimes a command line interface (CLI) fits better and sometimes it is nice to have a GUI with browsing functions. And perhaps you generally prefer an orthodox FM like Krusader because of its familiarity but use Dolphin when browsing through files.

Furthermore we received some criticism concerning the depending questions about the rating. The most simple approach for an analysis is to count ‘likes’. We believe in more elaborated methods and statistical evaluation that exceeds those introspection. In terms of usability the ISO 9241-110 ‘Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals’ defines seven different dialog principles. The question is whether or not users who expect efficiency from their chosen FM also state high values on the efficiency scale, and at the same time report low values on other scales. For instance, the ISO demands ‘learnability’ for a good usability, i.e. the usage of a dialog is guided or at least supported, or alternate interaction is proposed by tool-tips or the like. But nobody does expect those features from a CLI, which we assume to be efficient primarily. However, it is worth to discuss the norm in general as users are barely able to answer the plain (yet not simple) questions based on the wording of the norm.

Schedule

Most interesting are analyses in relation to FMs, OS, or user’s personal preferences. Some ideas:

• Are there differences in the satisfaction for different FMs? And if so: On what basis?
• Do Gnome users expect more simplicity from their FM compared to KDE users?
• Which part of Dolphin needs most attention for the future development?

And some questions with a rather academic background:

• Can we predict future changes due to age effect, i.e. do elder people request different features (except from accessibility)?
• Are motifs useful to predict expectations? E.g. high values in prestige goes along with more individualization. (cf. LibreOffice user research – Summary).

We will conduct those statistics within the next days and will report the results on this channel. If you have more questions in advance feel free to comment.

Managing files is the most basic task with computers. You apply a file manager to organize your stuff, to browse for a particular file, or to modify attributes. Just as much tasks are processed as many programs are available. Operating systems come with their own tools (GNOME uses Nautilus, KDE has Dolphin, at Mac OS X it is Finder, and Microsoft calls it Explorer) but countless other applications exist and fill more or less niches.

In our study we will investigate the pros and cons of those tools. We ask about the situation in which you make use of a file manager, for what reason you chose it, and what you do like and what not.

We invite you to participate in the study.

It contains of about ten questions and should be done within a few minutes. You may run the study multiple times if you make use of different file managers or varying tasks, for instance a graphical tool for browsing and the command line for managing stuff.

And we encourages you – next to taking part yourself – to spread the link to the survey widely:

• post it on your personal favourite social network,
• ask your friends, parents, neighbours,
• send the link via email.

Last but not least many thanks to the localization team! The study is available in English, Français, Deutsch, Español, Italiano, Українська, Magyar, Čeština, and Gallegan.

Finally, here is where you need to go:

http://user-weave.com/survey/59ea20901e254590b41dad1a0012d0ad

(Study closed at 2013-05-21, 12:00 am GMT+1)

Thank you for participation.

Naming Convention

Suitability for learning and self-descriptiveness, two of the basic usability goals, depend largely on the information users can read directly. Most graphical user interfaces use toolbar buttons to provide access to core functions. Those buttons usually contain an icon but no caption. The function is revealed by common sense (left most icon provides New), iconic depiction (a floppy points to Save), and tooltips that are shown when the mouse hovers the control. Obviously the latter are most important and it’s a good idea to have conventions for these labels.

It has become apparent that some of Libreoffice’ toolbar buttons provide confusing and sometimes misleading tooltips. Better labels would not only support learnability but also help to solve some of the mix-ups we found, e.g. in the case of the Navigator. It is common practice to name English functions starting with a verb followed by a noun or adverb. But take care with localization: different languages might have a different grammar! For instance, in German a verb-noun sequence has a strong imperative connotation and it’s better to have noun-verb labels. Anyway, the functions in each languages should be labeled consistently with the specific grammar in mind.

Recommendation for Libreoffice functions in the standard toolbar

We recommend to label all functions starting with a verb followed by noun or adverb (in case of English). Text should be concise, helpful, and easy to read. If the function can be started by shortcut it is added to the text in parentheses. Normal shortcuts combine the control-key (Ctrl) with a letter; the use of simple function keys should be avoided.

¹ It should be considered to remove this function from the standard toolbar

² Some functions need redesign, e.g. toolbar buttons must not get ‘overloaded’.

Conclusion

Functions should be labeled in a definite and unified way. Well named functions help users to understand the program and to learn how to use it efficiently. Convention for labels should be defined depending on the localization.

What do you think about these suggestions? Do you agree?

What has happened before

Metaphors are the basis of any good icon design. For instance, scissors are used to cut something and this metaphor fits perfect for the respective computer function. On the other hand, it is rather difficult to associate a filing cabinet, for example, with the function Save.

There are different ways for improving the usability of a specific function and its respective icon. Depending on the problem one might change the label, change the icon to be more obvious or change the underlying metaphor altogether.

As we compiled the results of our last study, it became apparent that some metaphors of Libreoffice’ standard toolbar do not work in their intended way. Our next step is to prepare new icons based on stronger associations between the underlying function and its graphical representation.

What we plan to do

As a starting point we selected the functions that have room for improvement and investigated alternative metaphors user could associate with these functions. We tried to be creative in our vantage points and also incorporated some of the ideas you had when you commented on our previous articles.

We selected ten functions, that need improvement and created a few alternative metaphors for each of these functions. These are partly from the original, natural pendants of these functions, partly from associations found in cultural and historical contexts and partly from connotations we had for the word, i.e. the function itself.

The function undo could for instance be represented by the metaphor ‘correction fluid’, because both the function and the metaphor erase the last written words. Of course, undo does more than that, but the core functionality might be better represented than with the depiction of a clipboard as it is today.
The metaphors we are searching for do not have to be perfect. We are rather in brainstorming mode and ask for your support, because everyone will have different things in mind when hearing about a certain function. Additionally we want to compare as many different solutions as possible. Also we need some distractors in between to evaluate the strength of the association.

The ten selected functions with their original metaphor in LibreOffice Writer and some examples of the metaphors we created are listed below.

function	original metaphor	example	suggestions
New document	document	egg	explosion sprout on/off sign
Save	floppy Disc	piggy bank	lock purse HDD downward arrow
Copy	two documents	RAM unit	key C copy machine x 2 arrows from a node
Paste	clipboard+Document	glue	key P pinned document tooth paste puzzle pieces
Undo	anti clockwise arrow	clock backward	correction fluid bin washcloth eraser
Redo	clockwise arrow	reversed bin	sisyphos’ rock clock forward pyramid caged animal
Format Paintbrush	brush	palette	stylised As clipboard+T brush+wrench
Page Preview	magnifier+printer	glasses	washing mashine magnifier + document
Navigator	compass	sitemap	road sign navigation device document with headings
Hyperlink	chain links	globe	spider ‘WWW’ underlined blue ‘link’

We need you!

Every function should have at least four good alternatives. This is where you come into play. Please help us to improve the study with your ideas for alternative metaphors. These can be quite diverse and from different contexts. So every input is appreciated.

Once we have found sufficient metaphors for each of these functions we need to create icons to these metaphors that fit in one icon set. And at this point we need your assistance again since we are not designers but usability experts. Icons should be redesigned to not have any biases because of the color, style, etc. It does not need to have a really fancy design with 3D effects or the like. But the layout must not influence users decision which one to choose in the upcoming test.

In this final study we will present these icons and users decide which of the icons / metaphors is fitting best to the function. This way we hope to find unambiguous metaphors that solve the mix-ups from the LibreOffice study and that most likely can also be found in other applications.

Summary

Can you think of other metaphors for these functions? Do you have any suggestions concerning our approach? If you are a designer, or know one, who would like to help us in creating these test icons, please contact us.

Results of the developers study

Recently, we conducted a small study how developers want to improve Dolphin. First we asked about usability criteria. When forced to prioritize the developers’ goal is to provide functionality in favor of simplicity, individualization, and learnability. This does not mean to produce a Swiss army knife but the opposite “as simple as possible” is clearly refused. Regarding these goals the current state is estimated as rather good by the developers; only one response was given with a negative tendency. Beside bug fixing the next planned tasks are enhancement of the information panel (including UI usage) and better system integration (seamless handling of KIO slaves and removable devices, activity awareness, better Nepomuk queries).

Rationale for Usability

Starting point of the investigation was the finding that “Recents” is barely useful at the moment because of the few and fixed periods (today, yesterday, this week, last week) that are offered. To broaden the original question how to improve Recents: We need a concept for Dolphin’s sidebars. Currently we have Places in terms of special folders that can be extended by Favorites or bookmarks, and Devices for access to all external interfaces. Users can show a tree structure for the file system (Folders), a Terminal for command line in- and output, and context sensitive Information of selected file(s) or folder. Additionally, Recents can be used to show files not according to folder structure but based on other criteria, like time of last access so far.

Options

According to Dolphin’s philosophy the primary usability goal is to provide features that are easy to discover and efficient to use. Since Dolphin was introduced as a simple alternative to Konqueror it’s focus could hence be defined as providing a maximum of simplicity (notice the contrast to what developers actually state in the survey).

Alternatively, if users really demand more features, simple solutions that focus on a particular problem make sense. For the actual question of Recents it might be a vertical dual slider (aka range slider) for instance, placed contiguous to Recents’ data. The control has a lower anchor (the oldest known entry) and an upper anchor (the most recent file), and thumbs to adjust the upper and lower bounds to define shown range.

On the other hand, users might want to have a more sophisticated interface with full control for different purposes and perhaps with fancy visualization. In terms of Recents users might not only want to browse files by time of last access but as well by file size, file type, or given tags, for example. Such a solution could be similar to a graphical presentation of folder content with some kind of drill-down navigation like offered by Filelight.

Objectives of further research

All three options make sense: purification (keep it simple and don’t add features), floating recents (just have some kind of unobtrusive recent filter), or swankification (provide a full featured, fancy graphical solution). The decision what to implement should be based on user requirements. For this reason we prepared (and will start soon) a follow-up study for users.

Methodology

The planned study intends to investigate general preferences first. As using a particular file manager depends on the task the user wants to accomplish, we start with a question about what file manager is used in which situation. For instance, users might choose a command line interface because of it’s efficiency even though they report low values for learnability and self-descriptiveness. Others want to have an easy to use tool (and chose it carefully for this purpose) but accept less features for individualization. Next we ask why a certain program is chosen. The answers will be compared with a detailed assessment of satisfaction with the program.

A good way for a reliable benchmarking of a certain software is to compare it with other, similar products. We assume that the majority of users will simply use the standard file manager. These people might not be able to report how well their file manager works compared to others. But if the data is summarized independently, e.g. average results of several responders for a certain product is compared to the average of other products, an interpretation of the results will be possible.

Request for support

We want to run the study in as many language as possible. The more participants we can attract, the more representative the results will be. If you want to help us with localization for your native language, please send us an email. You will get invited to our test platform UserWeave which also provides a tool for translation.

Last but not least we should mention that User Prompt is not affiliated with the developers of Dolphin. We only give recommendations on usability issues but the decision what will be realized is up to the core team. So please don’t blame them if anything we propose will not get implemented.

Finally: Don’t hesitate to comment. All opinions are welcome!

Some of the icons of LibreOffice are confusing. Based on the findings of our last study we present some quick and easy changes that improve functionality.

Introduction

In this article we want to provide suggestions to solve some of the mix-ups that we found in our LibreOffice icon test. We examined the standard toolbar icons of LibreOffice Writer. Over the past few weeks we published a few articles, where we discussed some of the more striking outcomes of the test. On the basis of these findings we derived guidelines for creating icon metaphors in general and some long term ideas to design new icons  for Libreoffice. Now we want to present our recommendations for quick fixes to some of the problems and mix-ups that we found.

General advices

A toolbar is primarily used for fast access to frequently used functions. Additionally, it provides an overview of core functions and hence helps users to operate the software efficiently. It’s always a challenge to find a good balance between both requirements and to avoid clutter in the toolbar. We recommend to double check the usage not only by the developers but also with users.

Furthermore, every structure that can be added to the toolbar is beneficial. While the main menu allocates all functions in categories the toolbar only provides small separators. Functions that belong to the same category should be placed together. Different categories have to be separated. If possible those categories should be supported by different wording for labels, e.g. ‘Show’ for sidebars and ‘Open’ for dialogs. And, last but not least, icon design should consider to adopt categories, as done with color codes for mime types for instance.

In the following we present recommendations to remove functions from the toolbar in order to reduce clutter.

Page Preview

Term	Tango	Oxygen
Page Preview
Print File Directly

Both Page Preview and Print File Directly have basically the same icon except that page preview has a magnifier / eye over the printer and Print File Directly has a lightning bolt (only Oxygen) above the printer. It could be assumed that the differences between the icons are too little and hence cause the mix-ups we found. On the other hand Page Preview gives a full overview of the current pages and allows to adjust the margins for the finished papers. This is always useful before printing, so Print File Directly could be integrated into the Page Preview view to improve functionality and reduce clutter.

Spelling and Grammar

Term	Tango	Oxygen
Spelling and Grammar
AutoSpellCheck

Again Spelling and Grammar and AutoSpellcheck use almost the same icon. Therefore there are a lot of mix-ups. Spelling and Grammar opens a wizard and suggests different spellings for a single term. AutoSpellcheck toggles the marking of words that might be wrong and offers alternatives via a right-click. By the same drop down menu the function Spelling and Grammar can be accessed for more information. We suggest to remove Spelling and Grammar from the toolbar, as it is can easily be accessed by other methods.

Format Paintbrush

Term	Tango	Oxygen
Format Paintbrush
Show Draw Functions

As discussed in ‘What is a pencil used for?‘ these two icons are often mistaken for one another. Format Paintbrush can copy the formatting and apply it to different areas. The function is not accurately named and the icon metaphor does not associate well with its function. We recommend changing both the name of the function and the icon metaphor. Show Draw Functions could then remain unchanged.

Data Sources and Gallery

Term	Tango	Oxygen
Data Sources
Gallery

Data Sources and Gallery are seldom used functions in LibreOffice that get mixed-up quite a lot. Data Sources is a function that allows access to databases, such as LibreOffice Base. Our Motifs of LibreOffice User-Study showed that only very few users make use of Base. Gallery can be used to insert media from different ‘themes’ into the document (maybe it would be easier to just insert the specific media manually instead of first adding it to these themes). Both functions should be removed from the standard toolbar.

Navigator

Term	Tango	Oxygen
Navigator

Navigator is another seldom used function. This might be due to the fact that its label is not quite feasible. An alternative might be ‘Show Document Structure’ (see Naming Convention). The metaphor behind the icons is a compass, which is fitting for the label Navigator ,but not for its function. The name of the function and its metaphor should be changed to improve usability.

Conclusion

We have found a lot of possible improvements for the icons of LibreOffice Writer. Functions should be labeled in a definite and unified way, some icon metaphors should be changed and toolbars should be tidied up, e.g. removing some seldom used function or merging some functions.

There have also been some mix-ups with commonly used functions that have no natural pendant to their icon metapher, like Copy and Paste and Undo and Redo. Therefore we are currently planning another study which will examine some of these metaphors. We want to determine if the currently used metaphors for a selected group of functions are good enough or if we can find some better fitting ones.

What do you think about these suggestions? Do you agree?

After the great response to our last icon test with over 3000 people participating, we are now testing the icons of the formatting toolbar. So the test is basically the same as last time, just with a different icon set.

Again, the LibreOffice design team encourages you – next to taking part yourself – to promote the link to the survey widely (Participants do not need to be users of LibreOffice):

• post it on your personal favourite social network,
• ask your friends, parents,
• send the link via email.

Thanks to the LibreOffice localisation team, the test is available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish this time. We warmly welcome volunteers that want to help us doing subsequent studies in even more languages! Please help to reach participants speaking your language.

The survey will run for about one week and the results of the tests will be published soon on this blog. If you are interested in the results of the last study this summarizing post is a good starting point.

Finally – here is where you need to go – it will take you less than 5 minutes if you are working fast:

http://userweave.net/survey/8704a50314dd4897809d9d790c6f7320

(Study closed at 2013-04-22, 01:00pm GMT+1)

Thank you in the name of the LibreOffice design team.

Semiotics is the study of signs and describes the perception, comprehension and communication of symbols. In the field of computer science, semiotics is especially relevant to the design of icons. A perfect metaphor is the prerequisite to unmistakably associate a function with an image. This article sums up some principles how to create icons, which we derived from a study with more than 3000 LibreOffice users.

Introduction

A lot of guide lines support designers creating icons. For example, the Microsoft Styleguide precisely defines for Aero icons how perspective, source of light, shade, saturation, size or level of detail should be like. Similar standards have been created for most projects, e.g. the LibreOffice Flat Icon Set. There are other, more generic lists that offer tips for icon creation (e.g here and here).

All these guides primarily serve the creation of a consistent look-and-feel. But an icon rarely stands for itself. Therefore the integration into an icon set needs to be considered, whereby homogeneity (the icons of a set should belong together) and heterogeneity (within a set the risk of mix-ups should be minimized) become relevant. Here is a good list on how to avoid mistakes in creating an icon set.

Along the aspects of homogeneity, heterogeneity and a graphically appropriate design, the most important premise for unambiguous symbols is the distinct association between the underlying function and its visual depiction. This relation is called a metaphor.

When creating a new set of icons the metaphors need to be defined first. They have to be a representable of the function within the whole functionality, easy to recognize and understandable. The results of a study on LibreOffice icons will illustrate most important aspects how to find these metaphors.

1. Apply metaphors only once.

On the one hand an icon set should be homogeneous and show the affiliation between the items. On the other hand there should be sufficient discrimination between the elements of a set to avoid mix-ups. This problem is especially relevant if the same metaphor is used for different functions. In our LibreOffice study we found this problem in the functions Format Paintbrush and Show Draw Functions: Both use a brush as metaphor. (What is a pencil used for?)

Figure 1: The metaphor “paintbrush” is used for two different functions.

2. Rethink conventionally used metaphors.

A lot of metaphors have been iconized so much that they were integrated into common usage. For more than 50 years a green triangle is used for play, a gray square for stop and a red circle for record in music players (and respectively software). A little more recent, but similarly famous are some functions we investigated in the context of word processing. But in our detailed analysis of Copy/Paste (How abstract can an icon be?) and Redo/Undo (Can a direction in time be displayed by spatial signs?) it becomes apparent that the usual depiction of these icons has a tendency for mutual mix-ups.

Figure 2: The metaphor for the icons copy and paste (from the tango set) do not depict their natural function.

Even though it is obvious that things are not working well, changes in those quasi standardized solutions should only be done with great care. However, we received a lot of interesting suggestions how to trigger these problems in the comments to our original articles. For example, the short-cuts ctrl+c and ctrl+v are so well-known that an icon might be created on the grounds of this information (see comment #4 by Robert Forsyth).

3. Antiquated metaphors might work well.

At the same time not all conventionally used metaphors need an overhaul, even when the underlying functions are not used in the same way anymore. In our study this was apparent for Save (About Antiquated Metaphors in Icons). This depiction of a floppy disc is intuitively associated with its function and clearly exceeds the alternative, even though a lot of people actually never touched a floppy disc.

Figure 3: The metaphor floppy disk of the oxygen set is superior to the alternative from the tango set.

4. Adjust the degree of abstractness according to familiarity of the metaphor.

While creating a metaphor the degree of abstraction from the original is of utmost importance. A lightning bolt can stand for ‘fast’ or ‘immediate’, but at the same time it can be interpreted as energy or hazard. The guiding principle should be deemed: The better known a function, the more abstract the metaphor can be. However, less known functions need explicit metaphors and a figurative support. In LibreOffice there are a few seldom used functions (e.g. the Navigator: Where does the Navigator lead you?), that should be placed less prominently or require a more pictorial icon.

Figure 4: The Navigator icon as a stylized compass is a good abstraction of the (English) function label, but it does not describe the actual function ‘Show document structure’.

 5. Arrows are not specific.

Human action and every software procedure has an immanent sequence. It is an obvious choice to use this sequence for the depiction of the icon; for example to use a downward pointed arrow to represent the storing of data from working memory into a file (see figure 2). You can clearly see the preference of designers for arrows in the comments to our detailed articles: There were a lot of proposed solutions that apply arrows. Next to the unspecific overflow of arrows, they might be problematic in sinistrograde localizations and when the sequence is ambiguous (see Can a direction in time be displayed by spatial signs?). Hence, when searching for a metaphor, try to avoid arrows as much as possible.

Figure 5: At first glance the left arrow might describe the function ‘(Show) Nonprinting Characters’ accurately, but the right pilcrow symbol scored optimum values in our test.

6. Define metaphors independent from language and culture.

Upon creating an icon, it should be considered that the original label of a function might not be understood all over the world. A well-known example is the term ‘Burn CD’ which is translated in French as ‘engrave’ (‘Graveur CD’). Therefore icons representing this term should not be based on the metaphor of fire. Similarly, colors can be understood differently and even pictograms are not necessarily standardized. In our study this becomes apparent in the function Hyperlink in the Oxygen icon set. The depicted ‘chain link’ works only in the English language and thus has a score of only 8.8 (e.g. it scores a worse 8.2 for answers in German).

Figure 6: The icon for hyperlink in the oxygen set is not culture independent.

 7. Make icons simple.

An icon should be rapidly recognized by its symbolic depiction and not be mixed-up with other icons. The simpler an illustration, the better these requirements are fulfilled. Two ways lead to these easy solutions: a perfect metaphor, like the scissor for the function Cut or a branding, respectively the establishment of a distinct symbolism, e.g. the logo of the Adobe Acrobat for the output of PDF documents. These icons get optimum values in the test.

Figure 7: Unambiguous icons are often distinguished by a plain symbolism. Both oxygen icons ‘Directly export as PDF’ and ‘Cut’ scored a perfect 10.

Several software functions do not perform actions that have an equivalent in the real world. Mostly this applies to support functions that are ordinary for experts but hard to understand for novices. Whereas users intuitively translate natural processing into business logic (if it fits) they have trouble with the technological IT surrounding.

An example is Copy & Paste. This functionality is implemented in almost every software providing the user with a clipboard. Following Wikipedia, “the command names are an interface metaphor based on the physical procedure used in manuscript editing to create a page layout”. We would like to scrutinize this statement. How do you think about that kind of short-term information storing in real world? Wouldn’t it be rather some kind of note that you write?

Results

The icon test reveals that not only novices struggle with those functions but normal users and experts as well. Results of the LibreOffice Icon Test are comparably weak for Copy and even worse for Paste (read about the methodology of testing icons).

Table1. Results of the Icon Test

Term	Tango		Oxygen
Copy		8.80		8.80
Paste		7.40		7.40

A detailed analysis of the icon-term assignments shows interesting mutual dependencies.

Table 2: Associations of term and icon in the icon test (% of all users)

	Tango		Oxygen
Term
Copy	80%	11%	79%	13%
Paste	9%	74%	7%	73%

Copy is mixed-up with Paste by about 10% of the participants. The Oxygen icon for Copy was additionally chosen from 12% of the participants as representation for the term New.

Conclusion

Both, copy and paste are frequently used functions and consequently the results are somewhat alarming. The data shows a lot of mix-ups, which may be caused by diverse reasons.

A lot of users will use the function short-cut Ctrl + C / V or Ctrl / Shift + Ins and therefore might not know the icons by heart. On the other hand, the function Cut with its short-cut Ctrl + X is probably comparable to these functions and the scissor icon gets the best possible result of 10.0 in the icon tests.

Another reason might be the relatively similar icons. Dual features with antagonistic or corresponding function will always cause difficulties and mix-ups. In both sets Copy is displayed by two sheets of paper lying on top of each other. Paste is just the same except that there is only one sheet on top of a clipboard. Additionally, in Oxygen there is no difference in size between the paper and the clipboard, which might explain the slightly higher mix-ups in this icon set.

The icons were obviously designed with the term ‘clipboard’ in mind. But this concept is a more technical and abstract, rather than a natural one and obviously misleads users. Additionally neither of the metaphors for copy or paste are based on an action found in nature or everyday life. So, if we find a metaphor that intuitively explains the function behind the icon it might reduce the mix-ups and increase the quality of the icons for these important actions.

Do you have suggestions for a more natural metaphor for copy and paste?

Seldom used functions: Data sources, Gallery, Navigator

A toolbar (here we refer to the primary, standard toolbar) is a UI element primarily designed for fast access to frequently used functions. But often it is diverted from its intended use and serves for presentation of special actions. It’s a great challenge for designers to develop an icon that fits those seldom used and probably less known functions.

Actually, the Navigator implemented in LibreOffice doesn’t provide some kind of help function as it might be understood by new users, but it shows or hides a side bar, where you can quickly jump to different parts of the document. The icon consists of an abstract star or, metaphorically, a compass rose.

Another seldom used function is Gallery. This function again toggles a toolbar which allows to select pictures, wallpapers, or tones and insert them into the current document. The icon is made of a folder with a small bitmap or some kind of abstract symbol respectively. And Data Sources provides functions to connect, browse, and interact with database tables. The icon looks like a bar chart within a document in Tango and some kind of form in Oxygen.

Results

The icon test reveals that users hardly associate the function with the correct icon (cf. Methodology of Testing Icons). The worst value of the whole icon test is found with 4.4 for Data Sources in Oxygen. As a rule of thumb a value below 9 is questionable.

Table 1: Results of icon test.

Term	Tango		Oxygen
Navigator		7.6		8.4
Gallery		9.6		7.6
Data Sources		7.8		4.4

Ambiguous metaphors lead the users to associate icons with unintended functions. Thus, the term ‘navigator’ is associated with the hyperlink icon (18% mix-up in Tango). Yet 60% of the participants failed to associate Data Sources with the correct icon in Oxygen. With 15% the icon is used for Navigator and 18% mismatch the Table icon to the function. The Gallery icon is used for ‘Document as E-Mail‘ in Oxygen with 24%. Only the Tango Icon for Gallery is working fine.

Conclusion

Whereas application’s whole functionality (that does not exclusively rely on context) is located in the main menu, the intention of the toolbar is fast access to frequently used functions. Developers must not abuse it for presentation of special actions. Neither ‘exit’ or ‘help’ nor functions to configure the interface in terms of switching other toolbars on /off are frequently used functions and must not be added to the standard toolbar. If it is necessary to direct users to special actions or to advice a feature one should consider different interactions.

Designers should pay attention on familiarity as well. The better a function is introduced the more abstract an icon can be designed. In contrast, rarely used and less known functions need support by concrete pictures and expressive metaphors.

Two, rather simple changes may help to access functions in LibreOffice more easily. First, rename Navigator to ‘Show Document Structure‘. By doing so the (English) verb-noun convention of function labels is met (other labels should be renamed accordingly). Moreover, misunderstandings with other functions that are related with any kind of navigation are removed. Similar advice can be given concerning the other functions.

Because all discussed functions just toggle toolbars on /off – and since they are presumably used rather seldom -, it should be taken into consideration to move them into a drop-down menu like suggested in What is a pencil used for? regarding Show Draw Functions. But nevertheless the icons and metaphors for Data Sources and Gallery need improvement.

Do you use these functions? What’s your opinion about our suggestions, i.e. moving them to a separate menu?

Redo and Undo are basic functions in almost every word processor. It is essential to be able to revisit your last actions, because human actions are error-prone. Simply using a function to go back and forth between actions is saving a lot of time and energy. The Tango and Oxygen icon sets use arrows pointing left or right. They are additionally colored yellow (Undo) and green (Redo). But these icons tend to get mixed up, as our Icon Test shows.

Results

The results with 9.6, resp. 9.4 in both icon sets, prove that icons are fast and reliable accessed (read about the methodology of testing icons).

Table 1: Results of the Icon-test.

Oxygen
Redo
Undo

Tango
Redo
Undo

Looking at the assignment ratio cross table though, the difference between Undo and Redo becomes striking. With about 95% the function Undo is associated with the correct icon and only gets mixed up to 3-4% with the Redo icon. But vice versa the mismatch increases to ~14%. That means the term Redo is associated to a certain degree with the yellow left pointing arrow.

Table 2: Cross-table of mutual associations.

	Tango		Oxygen
Term
Undo	96%	3%	95%	4%
Redo	14%	85%	13%	86%

Discussion

Introspectively you might remember the short hesitation, when you wonder which icon to press for Redo. But why?

Left and right are known to be error-prone. At least with time pressure many people tend to confuse left and right. Asked for directions their hands point the correct way, but their words don’t. It needs concentration to sort it all out, and this effort can lead to mistakes. This explanation follows the idea of linguistic determination.

On the other hand and with ecological psychology in mind, a simple explanation based on real world behavior should be preferred. The physical event of going forward is found in reading, for instance. One puts a sheet from the right and turns it over to the left. An action that is just opposite to the direction of the forward / backward icons!

Last but not least, the mental model should be taken into account. The functions Undo and Redo can be understood in two different ways. First in terms of an operation stack. All input is added to the first list and moved to a second list by undo (or back with redo). Alternatively, one can assume that redo just repeats the last operation, and undo works as comparative function. These two mental models are not the same. While the stack idea contains nothing but user input, the ‘repeat last operation’ function could be used separately (like apply last formatting in former Microsoft Office via Ctrl+Y).

Conclusion

Left and right, as well as forward and backward are dual aspects of one feature and need differentiation when false access should be avoided. But the common idea to go back with left is not necessarily supported in real world and could possibly be improved. Better metaphors could be found on the basis of natural processing.

Do you have any suggestions for a natural metaphor that represents Undo and Redo and does not rely on a direction?

Dolphin, the default KDE file browser, targets to be efficient and intuitive. It is designed to be most beneficial for two types of users, represented by the Personas Lisa and Simon, who are at least a bit familiar to the concept of files and folders, but not necessarily with the file structure of Linux itself.

For quick access, Dolphin contains a couple of sidebars allowing to reach different places, devices or recently used files. Recently, on some mailing lists the ‘recent sidebar’ has been the target of some discussions. The point has been made that the ‘recent sidebar’ is rarely used and it hence should be improved.

Now this is where we want to step in and find out how developers and users can contribute in finding a new and better approach for the problem of accessing files that have been used in the past. With this article, we want to outline our idea how to address this question and we would like to discuss our approach with you.

Step 1 – collecting developers ideas

First we want to conduct a survey to learn about the current ideas and feelings of the developers. Questions we want to rise are for instance:

• Is the vision and are the Personas still the target for the development of Dolphin?
• What feature ideas do the developers have?
• What purpose should be served by sidebars in general?
• Where do the developers want Dolphin to go?

Step 2 – gathering users feedback

Next we are going to do an end user survey. We would like to know things like:

• Which file browser do users prefer and for what reason?
• What do users expect of a ‘perfect’ Dolphin? Does it match with developers ideas?
• In what situation do users need more support by Dolphin?
• Do they make use of the ‘recents sidebar’? And in which situations do they need to access recent files at all?

Food for thought

With this examination we would like to find out whether the envisioned improvements are valid. We want to anonymously collect a pool of the different goals developers have for Dolphin. These results are then compared to the expectations, needs and wishes of the users towards Dolphin. An analysis of the strengths and weaknesses (SWOT analysis) will then be used to determine which aspects need improvement.

What do you think of our procedure? Anything we can enhance? Please share your experience and opinion.

Personas, as well as other artifacts, should always be created data-driven and must not base on guessing. We introduce methods for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of users and show how such results looks like.

Introduction

It is not unusual that good start-up ideas get compromised over the time and become bloated. Each newly introduced feature that fits special requirements jeopardizes general usability. So we suggest to check the target group regularly to make sure that goals and requirements of users haven’t changed so far.

Steganos is a well known developer of security related software. Over many years their tools and programs have grown to applications and suites, leading to a rather wide spread portfolio. At this point we were asked to help. The questions were: Who is the customer? How does she use the tools? Answers are needed to make business decisions based on the actual user population.

Method

For evaluation of target users we recommend to create so called Personas as some kind of typical or target user. Personas are a handy tool to communicate about users, to focus development, and along with scenarios to create ‘usability style use-cases’. However, a Persona must not be generated based on guessing and arbitrary assumptions but on valid and representative data. Those data can be retrieved from many sources. For instance an existing user data base might be analyzed or guerilla studies can be conducted. Together with Steganos, we decided to conduct an online survey on UserWeave. To analyze the users’ structure we asked questions on age, gender, social integration, preferences, and fears in terms of software security. Our hypothesis was that every tool has its own audience from elder people that use the password manager to younger and more active people with security concerns on data thievery.

Results

The results are quit surprising. Out of 3983 responses in total we have 2325 people that completed the study. That response quote of almost 60% is a fairly high value in the context of a non incentive study. It emphasizes the users’ interest in the Steganos products. The age pattern shows that, except one tool that has been created recently for younger people, the users are rather elderly people. The overwhelming amount of users are male (only 59 female participants). Mostly the tools are used for a private purpose (82.5%). Usage for business purpose only (3.6%) or for both private and business (10.8%) is less common. Last but not least the most interesting result for Steganos: most users totally agree with the product and would recommend it to friends (80,8% answer with one or two on a five scale semantic differential with the anchors ‘yes’ and ‘no’).

Recommendation of product

Conclusion

Together with more specific questions and with analysis of free text answers we were able to create a very specific Persona. This Persona allows Steganos to make management decisions based on real world data and will lead the future development. For instance, bearing the age structure in mind they can focus on elderly people with the existing products. Usability has to take this into account. On the other hand, if the management wants to attract a younger audience, it would probably make sense to create new products for them, that do not interfere with the existing audience.

If you want to learn more about Personas and Scenarios, Animatas and Destinatas, and how to profit from them in your situation, we are happy to help. For instance we offer a variety of training courses.

Functions with similar icons

Instructions for icon design, including the Tango Icon Theme Guidelines for instance, require a set of icons to be homogeneous not only in lighting, perspective etc. but also in general style and the basic idea. But, of course, every icon of the set needs to be unique and distinct from others.

The functions Format Paintbrush and Show Draw Functions in Libreoffice (and other word processors) are assigned to icons with a broad pencil and a small brush respectively. Actually, the function Format Paintbrush is used to copy formatting of a passage and paste it somewhere else. And Show Draw Functions is just a switch to show or hide the toolbar for draw functions.

Results

When we asked the users which icon fits best with one of these functions the resulting values are in a questionable range (read about user-testing of icons). Format Paintbrush gets 8.4 and 8.2 and Show Draw Functions only 7.6.

Table 1: Results of Icon Test.

Term	Tango		Oxygen
Format Paintbrush		8.4		8.2
Show Draw Functions		7.6		7.6

When presented with the term Format Paintbrush, 14% (Tango) and 8% (Oxygen) chose the icon for Show Draw Functions. Vice versa 23% (Tango) and 21% (Oxygen) mixed up the icons when asked for the icon representing the term Show Draw Functions.

Conclusion

It is likely that this mix-up results from the fact that both functions utilize the brush metaphor. Either in terms of a broad paint brush (for formatting) or a small pencil (for drawing functions). And the number of bristles is a bad indicator for the underlying function.

The reason why Format Paintbrush scores slightly better than Show Draw Function is probably due to the term ‘Paintbrush’ itself, which is a strong clue (at least for English language). Also, we could guess that Show Draw Function is simply used less often and the icon has not been learned that well.

Furthermore, Format Paintbrush doesn’t really suit the description of the function. Formatting is “cloned” by this operation. This has nothing in common with normal actions you would do with a paintbrush. So it is not only the icon that does not work – the terms used are questionable as well.

Which implications do these results have?

First, the question should be asked whether the drawing toolbar needs to get toggled on and off frequently. If not, the Show Draw Function item can well be moved to the main menu or to some other menu. Such a menu might contain all functions to show or hide toolbars whose current on/off status would be visible by their check state.

For the Format Paintbrush function a better label should be found, as discussed above. But also this function is not easy to use currently. Both parts – that is to copy the format from one position and to apply it somewhere else – are conducted by the same button, toggled down in copy state. Due to the fact that a clone operation can only be conducted once (after pasting the origin is cleared), it can’t be used to repetitively format within a document. Additionally,  formatting should preferably be applied by styles. So we think that it should be taken into consideration to remove this function completely or to redesign its behavior.

What are your experiences? Do you have ideas of better terms or better icons for these functions? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Demographics

We are happy about the 95 users who finished our last survey, evaluating the Milan release of Tine 2.0. A massive increase from 3% to 16% of females taking part makes us confident that we are actually getting in touch with our user base. Also more than 50% of the participants state that they are primarily end users of the system.

Again our location peak is Germany (74%), this time followed by Denmark (12%). But users from all over the world took part, speaking more than 10 languages. With our survey we mainly reached experienced users that use Tine 2.0 for more than 3 months (80%).

Tine 2.0 is getting mature

One of the most obvious findings in the survey results from the different free answer options. In the surveys we give the users the opportunity to express how Tine 2.0 could be improved to make their lives better. In the past surveys there were clear trends about what is still missing in Tine 2.0 and we have always worked hard to fulfill these wishes. With the Milan release for the first time we cannot identify clear trends anymore about things missing. This does not mean users do not state great ideas about how we could improve Tine 2.0 even further. And we hereby promise to pick up at least some of the great ideas. But there are no common things missing.

We conclude that we have reached a mature state with the project. We are now have everything people agree on when they want to use a groupware.

Maturity causes problems

We can find a downside to this good news in the data though. If you take a look at the graph above, it shows the usage and the rating of different components of Tine 2.0. You can easily see that CRM is used by much less people than the calendar. It also shows that components that are used more frequently are rated higher by the users. This generally is good news, as we spent time for optimization into important or frequently used applications first. But if we compare the values of this survey to our goals and to the last surveys we have to state that we lost quality. This probably is due to our effort of putting new features into Tine 2.0 without decent refactoring of the workflows and UIs. We promise to take these results seriously. With the upcoming upgrade to extJS4 we will take the chance to redesign and to integrate the existing functionality to ensure a better experience.

Discuss the findings!

As always: All the data of this survey is free and publicly available. We use the platform UserWeave.net to conduct the surveys and you can find all data in the public project Tine 2.0 on the platform. You only have to register for free to analyse the data yourself. We would be very happy if you like to share or discuss any findings with us!

It seems to be an easy truth: Too much detail in icons confuses the users. So we wondered whether we could find any evidence for this truth in the data of our large scale test of the LibreOffice Icons.

First we did an expert rating and sorted the icons in two groups, depending on the level of detail in the icon.

Group 1 – Low Detail Icons

Group 2 – High Detail Icons

Some Statistics

Next we did a plot of the ratings the icons in the different groups achieved. The higher the value, the better the icon (read about the methodology of testing icons):

It looks like the two groups are actually different – but to prove this, just looking is not enough, some calculations are needed. So we did a Mann-Whitney-U Test and the value Z=4.015 shows that these two groups are actually different on a significance level of p<0.001.

What do we learn from this?

Whenever you create icons, try to be as iconic as possible – or to phrase it differently: try to remove as much details from your icons as possible. It is likely that the quality of your icons will win.

More Information

As always you can find the raw results of the icon test in the LibreOffice Project on UserWeave. You are happily invited to make up your own mind and to discuss the results with us.

A lot of the Tango and Oxygen icons that are used in the standard tool bar in LibreOffice Writer are based on the same metaphor. From the icons that differ in metaphor, the icons used for ‘Saving a document’ are especially interesting. This is one result of the large scale icon test of LibreOffice Writer icons (read about the methodology of testing icons).

In our work with different projects we have often been asked why antiquated metaphors are still used in icon design. Examples of these antiquated icons could be the shiny metal container representing a database or the floppy disc for saving data. Younger people might not even have seen either of the originals.

Use a floppy disc to represent ‘save’

As the Oxygen icon used for saving is a floppy disc, while the Tango icon is a filing cabinet with an inwards pointing arrow, we were especially curious for the performance of these two icons. Would younger users prefer the cabinet as they might not know what a floppy disc is?

The results are stunning. There was not the slightest problem with using the floppy disc, while the filing cabinet metaphor more or less failed:

Even when looking at the group of young users the results do not change significantly and the antiquated floppy disc still scores a perfect 10.0. The filing cabinet scores higher with younger than with older users though, but still not reaching acceptable values.

As a conclusion we strongly advise you not to try to find a substitute for the floppy disc to represent the ‘save’ action.

Is a filing cabinet even more antiquated?

Even though the data does not allow us to draw direct conclusion about the rational behind it, we think there might be two major problems with using the filing cabinet metaphor:

• It is likely that esp. younger people do not know what a filing cabinet actually is. They are not used to storing paper data or do have access to a filing cabinet. So improving the icon to such a metaphor does not make it easier for younger users, but makes it harder for older users.
• There is too much detail in the cabinet icon in respect to its size. The significant longer time people needed to identify the icon as the right one indicate that they first had to reason about it and disassemble it into its meaningful parts to be able to read it. The floppy disc on the other hand is a clear and simple icon (We will publish a discussion about detail in an icon soon).

We should use the floppy disc icon for future version of the Tango icons in LibreOffice.

You are invited to take a look at the raw results of this study in the LibreOffice project on UserWeave.net and discuss with us in the comments.

What a vivid community! We asked the users of LibreOffice to take part in our Icon Tests and about 1500 participants joined each of the tests within a week. The first test used the Tango, the second the Oxygen icon set.

For the tests we used the tool tip of the icon within LibreOffice Writer as stimulus. They were presented randomly along all 24 icons (read more about the methodology of testing icons). In both test we asked the same demographic questions to be able to describe the population that took part.

Great User Feedback

In total 1998 participants started the Tango test and 1493 finished it. This „responder quote“ of 74% is fairly high for an online study that takes some minutes. In the Oxygen study 2527 participants started and 1645 finished. The drop out of about 35% is still good for online studies.

The second study attracted more people because we got a contributor who translated it into Spanish (see Table 5 below). Next to this both studies were run in English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Polish. So if you want to help us to conduct the next survey in your language as well – and hence to increase your cultural impact – just drop me a mail.

The population of users is about equal in both studies. Most users are below 40 years old as you can see from Table 1.

Table 1: Age distribution

Where are the women?

Table 2 shows the typical bias towards a male population in free software surveys. If you have any idea how to get a better ration here, please use the comments to share it!

Table 2: Sex distribution

In Table 3 you can see that users use Writer and Calc on a very frequent base. Impress still gets quite high ratio of usage but the other applications Draw, Base and Maths are only used rarely

Table 3: Usage of LibreOffice Components

The typical user we reached uses a Linux Machine. Table 4 lists the details.

Table 4: Usage of operating systems

LibreOffice all over the world

Last you can see in the rather lengthy Table 5 that we got feedback from over 100 countries. Here you can see how much more users we got from Spanish speaking countries in the Oxygen test, proving how important localisation of the tests is.

Table 5: Countries of origin of the participants

Conclusion

As always it’s surprising how agile the LO community is and how many people participate in such tests. With a distribution of users like we have reached, we can split data on several parameters and still have enough values for valid evaluations.

The corresponding values in both tests are a strong indicator for the gathering of representative data. Still, it would be good to mobilize female users for the next tests. We are convinced there are more female users of LibreOffice out there.

Join with your expertise

As always: If you are interest in the raw data, simply join the LibreOffice project on UserWeave and add your own thoughts and findings in the comments.

A picture says more than 1000 words. On top of that, icons have a fixed size, no matter which language the software runs in. This is part of the reason why they are widely used to represent functions or actions for example in menu bars.

In the last weeks we have asked users to help us to assess the quality of the icons we use in the LibreOffice Writer menu bar. We used the Open Usability Platform UserWeave.net to conduct the tests. This platform presents a single term and a variety of icons. The task for the participant is to quickly select the best fitting icon for that term.

Combining objective and subjective measurements

The platform measures how fast an icon was chosen by the user. So it provides two distinct indicators:

1. The subjective choice of an icon
2. The objective time it takes to choose the icon

The platform calculates an overall score for the icon-term relationship, that ranges between 10 for a perfect icons to a theoretical minimum of 0, when an icon was never associated with a term.

Implicitly some more indicators can be derived, like the number of missing assignments and the ratio of icons that get assigned to multiple terms. You can find values for each of them in the results.

In the example above you can see that the icon for ‘Auto Spellcheck’ was chosen quickly, but often got mixed up with the icon for ‘Spelling and Grammar’, giving a poor overall score of 6.0.

You have to understand that this does not necessarily mean that the icon is unsuited. It might also be that the term it is supposed to be associated with is problematic. So the test really measures the strength of the relation between icon and term.

In the LibreOffice tests for example we use the tooltips that appear, when you hoover the mouse over the icons as terms. So we test the strength of the relation between the icon and the actually used term to explain the icon to the user.

Evaluate the quality of your existing icons

There are two possible ways to test icons. In the first one you present a set of icons and the corresponding tool tip for each of the icons. So you have one target icon for every term.

As a result you would hope for a perfect 10.0 for all your icon-term relationships. But in reality you get a feeling about the differing quality of the icons you provide. For this way of testing you can say as a rule of thumb that good icons score well above 9.0.

Find the best icon for your term

In a second use-case you try to find the best icon for a certain term. Therefore you present different icon solutions for this term. With this way of testing you have to be aware that icons that are similar, e.g. because they use the same metaphor or only differ in colour, will most likely not differ much in their result.

With the LibreOffice study we have taken the first step. We now know how good (some of) the different icon-term relationships in LibreOffice are, and we will publish the results in the next weeks. We will also take the next step and find better metaphors for the not-so-good-working icons using the second approach.

Join the discussion!

You are invited to take a look at the raw results of the studies in the LibreOffice project on UserWeave.net and discuss with us in the comments.

After the great response to our last icon test with over 2000 people participating, we are now testing the corresponding oxygen icons. So the test is basically the same as last time, just with different icons.

Again, the LibreOffice design team encourages you – next to taking part yourself – to promote the link to the survey widely (Participants do not need to be users of LibreOffice):

• post it on your personal favourite social network,
• ask your friends, parents,
• send the link via email.

Last time we only attracted about a dozen female participants – I guess we can do better than that!

Thanks to the great LibreOffice localisation team, the test this time is available in English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish and Spanish. We warmly welcome volunteers that want to help us doing subsequent studies in even more languages! Please help to reach participants speaking your language.

The survey will be closed on Tuesday and the results of the tests will be published during the LibreOffice Conference and on this blog.

Finally – here is where you need to go – it will take you less than 5 minutes if you are working fast:

http://userweave.net/survey/22e772e174ed479abe2658be44dedca2

Thank you in the name of the LibreOffice design team.

All users are asked to participate and rate the quality of the current Tine 2.0 version. This feedback is important to direct the future development of Tine 2.0.Results will be presented on this blog.

Especially admins are asked to promote this survey to their users. You can find the invitation directly on the Tine 2.0 log in page or on UserWeave. The study will run until Friday, 26th of October.

Thank you for your participation on behalf of the Tine 2.0 development team.

Thank you on behalf of the LibreOffice UserExperience Team.

Germany really offers a lot of great providers for renewable energy. Our research finally brought us to naturstom. They have a great concept of investing into new plants and hence really help to change the way power is produced. We use naturstrom to power our office and the servers we host ourselves

Our external servers are hosted by Hetzner. One of the reasons to choose them was their concept of using green energy provided by naturenergie.

I haven’t been blogging for a long time. To give you some short reason for that: After almost 6 years I have decided to leave Apliki, the company I once co-founded. This process was a little time-consuming but is finished now.

Why could that be of interest for you?

• I will be much more engaged in the usability of Free Software projects in future.
  Next to the work I have been doing and will continue to do for Tine 2.0, I already teamed up much closer with the KDE and the LibreOffice community. And I am actually still looking for more challenging projects from the Free Software World.
• I will try to re-animate OpenUsability.org.
  I care a lot about this initiative. It tries to accomplish two things: First it helps to provide Usability Competence to Free Software projects. Secondly it tries to make process and work done in usability more transparent, so more people can benefit from it. Sad enough, this project is basically dead at the moment, but I want to work to re-animate it again (And you are happily invited to help re-building the structures we need to fulfill our duty!).
• I will free a software for user integration.
  Over the years at my old company, we have been developing a web based tool that helps to integrate users into the development process of software. I am currently working to release this software under the aGPL (Again, you are happily invited to join and support me in this effort).

So whether you

• have a special project and want to improve its user experience or
• would like to help building up structures to make usability work better for free software projects in general or
• are interested in supporting a free software project with your usability skills, but have no clue how to start:

Simply drop me a line (b [at] lazs [dot] de) or talk to me directly at FOSDEM.

2012 will definitely be a good year for Usability and User Experience of Free Software! Join to make it even better!

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!

Demographics

The answers we got were from male (97%) people with an avarage age of 36 (SD=8.4). Most of them came from Germany (82%) followed by Austria and Italy (3% each), Sweden, Switzerland and China (2% each). Altogether there were answers from 13 different countries speaking 11 different languages. German of course was the most prominent one (84%), followed by Italian (4%), Chinese (3%), Russian and Swedish (2% each). Seeing this, the vast majority of Tine 2.0 user still is in Germany. This is not surprising as this project actually started in Germany. But it is great to see the increasing numbers not only of users taking part in the survey, but also the increasing numbers of countries our users come from.

To stress the fact that we do have a quickly growing community, 45% of the answers were from new users of Tine 2.0, using it less than 3 months. Interestingly enough, our surveys seem to be encouraging even for long term users: 25% reported to be using Tine 2.0 for more than 1 year. Apart from this indicator 90% of the participants stated they would like to take part in further surveys. So our surveys seem to be on the right track for you.

In the past we have been struggling with the fact that we reached too little non-technical or non-administrative users in our surveys. Again, the results of this survey are very promising: About 50% of the participants stated that they were primarily end-users of Tine 2.0.

Still seeing the amount of male participants, we do not reach a real representative sample of our users yet. This is something we will continue to work on.

Benchmarking

In every Tine 2.0 survey we include benchmarking questions: We ask the participants to rate the state of Tine 2.0 and the individual components on a scale from ‘needs improvements’ (1) to ‘excellent’ (7). Looking at the answers of all users we find that the estimation of untouched components as well as the overall impression of Tine 2.0 stays stable compared to previous results. Looking at the values we can clearly see that all users are satisfied (values above 5) with the general impression (5.47) as well as with the state of the the most used components address book (average=5.22, usage rate=91%) and calendar (5,09, 94%). Our work in the administration area (5.06, 82%) pays off, and for the first time we get a value of above 5 for this component as well.

The effort we put in on the mid-used component email (4.6, 77%) also pays off. It improved by 0.3 points and for the first first time reached our internal goal for mid-used components of a rating above 4.5. Untouched tasks (4.83, 66%) stays about were it was.

For the less used components time-tracker (4.25, 44%) and CRM (4.00, 35%) we target above average values. We reached these in the past and as we did not touch these components, the rating was stable compared to last surveys.

So on the first glance this is a result to open a bottle of champagne. For the first time we reached all Usability metrics we have set ourselves as goals. Congratulations to the team – and a big thank you to all our users, who helped us to get there! Without your participation in our surveys and our forum or you buying support to solve urgent features, we couldn’t have gotten here.

But where there is sun, there also is shade. So taking a closer look at the results and focussing only on the end-users, we see that Tine 2.0 obviously is more loved by non-end users, than by end-users. What do I mean by that? If you are primarily using Tine 2.0 and not setting it up for others, you are more likely to like it a little less. The avarage rating of an end-user is about 0.2 lower than that of all users. This is true for all applications except for time-tracking. End-users rate time-tracking slightly better than non-end-users.

We promise to work on this result. Of course we want to achieve our Usability goals for every population of Tine 2.0 users.

Missing features

We also asked for suggestions and missing features. Obviously I do not want to bore you with detailed results of this, because we got a lot of long and detailed answers. So I keep it short: There were many interesting ideas in the results, quite some we could easily fix, some that we cannot even put on the horizon. But by far the most wanted features were a filemanager, and CalDAV / CardDAV support. And hey, what should I say: we listen to you. In the next version of Tine 2.0 (Milan) all of these will be included (and much more). Perhaps you like to try it out and give us some feedback on it?

As a short note on how you can influence the development: Next to stating what you think Tine 2.0 is missing in our surveys, you always have the possibility to code it yourself or to pay someone to code it for you.

Speed of Tine 2.0

We have been doing a lot to improve the speed of Tine 2.0. So we wanted to know how you experience the velocity of Tine 2.0. Of course, your impression is not only influenced by factors we can influence. So the speed of your server, the browser you use and your Internet connections brings in a big source of variance to this question. The happier we were when we saw the results: 78% of you reported that the speed is at least ‘OK’ and 55% reported that speed improved over time. So we can be happy with these results too, seeing that our work in this area has paid off.

Email usage in Tine 2.0

One of the focus point of the last release was to improve emailing. As I said above, we are happy to have reached our Usability goal for emailing with this release, but we wanted to know more. Now we understand, that the access to your emails varies widely. Most of you use a desktop as well as a mobile mailer, some even other web mailers next to Tine 2.0. So Tine 2.0 basically has to integrate with that. Most people only have one email account, but the reported numbers going up to 150 with a median of 3. We are very pleased that you like way we provide filter for emails in Tine 2.0 (4.64, scale see above).

Filtering in Tine 2.0

Last but not least we wanted to know how satisfied you are with the way we are doing filtering in Tine 2.0. As you know the powerful filter concept is one of the core parts of Tine 2.0. So it was more than time to get some feedback on it. And the result was surprising: 51% of you reported that would like to have more filtering options. Only 1 person said that less options are needed. Again, we will take this result and your detailed comments serious and promise to further extend the filtering system.

First thing I want to say is ‘Thank you!’ to all the people who have been organizing the conference. It was a great experience for me – full of contrasts, inspiration and networking. I was very happy to meet so many of you LibreOffice enthusiasts personally. There have been a lot of detailed descriptions on various topics (e.g. I really liked Christophs post, also check the LibreOffice Planet). I do not want to add much more to these – only one little thing:

I gave a talk on ‘Detecting signals in the feedback noise’. You can find my .pdf slides here. I was told there would also be a stream / video of the talk, but I haven’t found it yet.

Unfortunately all the usability and user experience related talks were in a room almost impossible to find. At least I hope this was the reason for so few people attending my talk . I do hope these topics will get more focus and attention in future!

I am really looking forward to meeting all of you next year again!

If you are interested in more detailed background information, please have a look at the past postings.

Users want to contribute

It’s remarkable that a huge number of people (n=5419) answered our questions in about one week, with a really low drop-out (~75% completed the survey).

Usability is a major issue of modern applications. We believe that a user-centric development can help to create usable software, e.g. make easier and more enjoyable to create better results. For a user-centric development users need to willing to join us. The survey is the prove that LibreOffice users are willing to do so – so let’s start to make it possible for our users to efficiently and enjoyably participate in the future development.

Motifs: Describing users beyond Personas

One main purpose of this study was to investigate a more psychological approach to describe the typical LibreOffice users. Currently the most common method for doing so is called Persona. A Persona basically is an aggregation of typical user characteristics described in the form of a fictional user of a product that is used to unify the view of the development team on the user base.

As psychologists we were always dissatisfied about the lack of a scientific, psychological ground to this methodology. Therefore we adopted the psychological concept of ‘motifs’ for our study.

The scientific grounding was developed by Norbert Bischof, known as Zurich Model of Social Motivation, and is based on ethology. It postulates three general systems: security, arousal, and autonomy. The latter again is divided into power, prestige, and achievement. The model describes  a regulatory loop that combines all motifs.

Motifs can be used to explain and predict human behavior, e.g. people with a higher motif on arousal will in the same situation more likely do something that excites them than those who have low arousal value.

In our study we found first hints that using motifs could be well suited for describing typical users in a user-centric design process.

Security

Security is a more basic motif. We picked the question “I need familiar people around me” to access it. Because it is more relevant for children we did not find a significant relation to our dependent variables or the use of LibreOffice.

Arousal

Arousal deals with new situations, search for excitations, adrenalin. We asked the participants about their self-estimation on the statement “Unknown situations are very attractive to me”. The results combined with questions concerning the use of LibreOffice and software in general show that people that have a higher arousal:

• utilize Impress and Calc excessively and
• make use of the possibility of self individualization within the software.

Power

The motive of Power was assessed by accordance with the statement “In a work team I like to take the lead”. The higher people scored on the power motif,

• the higher was the self-estimated relevance of computers,
• the higher was the self-estimated expertise,
• more intensively all LibreOffice tools were utilized,
• the higher was the interest to interact fast and graphical instead of precise and textual.

Prestige

The question “I enjoy it, when other people pay special attention to me” was used to assess the prestige motif. People with high values on this question need social integration (perhaps they would have more friends on social networks too) and avoid to make failures in contrast to such with high values in arousal. In particular high values correlate with:

• preference of assistance and active support,
• preference of graphical interactions,
• praise of innovative designs (like ribbons),
• higher utilization only of Impress.

Achievement

Achievement, assessed as “It is important for me, to deliver good performances”, turned out to be highly relevant for almost all of the responders. Due to this extreme distribution with roof effects we cannot reveal a particular relation to LibreOffice or UI in general. We will have to rephrase this question for future surveys.

Conclusion

We believe in motifs as replacement of or extension to personas. Perhaps not all of the postulated motifs are relevant in context of UI design but if we can create standard users based on this approach the results would be valid and reproducible. In our next studies we will integrate a revised questionnaire for assessing motifs, usage preferences and the use of LibreOffice, so we can re-assure our findings.

Acknowledgments

I want to say a special ‘Thank you!’ to Heiko Tietze and Isabel Menz, who have worked hard on the data and the postings. And of course I want to say ‘Thank you!’ to everyone who took part in the survey. Keep up the good spirit!

Yes, we still haven’t written about all results from our LibreOffice user research – but I promise, this will be the last of the long posts about the results.

To understand the preferences our users have when using software, we created nine questions on a six-step semantic differential. The questions are about preferences in menu navigation, workflow, individualization and the use of templates.

We found, that …

• the sample divides up in those who like ribbon style menus and those who don’t
• older people prefer classic menus while younger people go for ribbons
• younger people prefer to be actively supported by the software while older people only want support after asking for it
• older people more often use individual configurations and self-formatting than younger people
• people with a strong prestige motif prefer active support, to be led by assistants and they use graphical dialogs instead of textual ones
• people with a strong arousal motif prefer individual configurations and self-formatting

Part 1: Menu navigation

Structure

The first question was about menu navigation. We wanted to know whether user prefer to have:

• many menu items in fewer levels of a menu or
• less menu items in more levels.

Obviously the more functions a software has, the more menu items are there. Even with a lot of functions, the menus should still be neat and clear.

We did not find a specific pattern in the answers. Although there are some people on either extreme side, we could not find any moderating effect.

Organization aka ribbons

This next question was about preference of a ribbon style toolbar on the one side (low values) versus a classic menu and a set of toolbars on the other side (high values). Microsoft invented Ribbons as a solution to the problem above: which functions should be directly accessible?

This question about the preference turns out to be of very controversy matter. People either love or hate ribbons, which is shown in the histogram.

We also found that there are strong effects between this question and the rating on the motif prestige (graphic on the right). People who rate higher on prestige prefer ribbons (F_(1,4176)=48.61; eta=0.601). This is an interesting result as it wasn’t expected. One possible reason could be that people, who want to be popular and admired by others also try to keep up on latest developments and to be always up to date. Are there more ideas to this?

There is an even stronger effect of the variable age on answering this question.   Older people are more likely to prefer classic menus while younger people prefer ribbons (F_(1,4011)=496.28; eta=0.992). As ribbons are newer inventions, they are easier to understand and handle for people, who never got too used to the classic menus. This result is consistent to the findings of other studies.

To summarize one can say that people either like or dislike ribbons. Younger people and such with high values on prestige are more likely to enjoy ribbon-like controls. On the other hand there are a lot of users that would refuse to use these ‘gimmicks’. We think the direction of interface design taken with the invention of ribbons is good but they still need to better elaborated and understood.

Optimization

The last one of the questions about menu navigation deals with menu control. We asked about the preference to use a mouse on the one side of the semantic differential vs. a keyboard (shortcuts and keystroke combinations) to control menus on the other side. Mouse control is easier and more intuitive. Keystroke combinations are faster but harder to find out and they have to be memorized.

We did expect effects of motifs, age or expertise to take an effect on this preference statement. But again, this question turned out to be not selective for the sample. Obviously, there are people on every step between the options.

Part 2: Workflow

Assistance

The first question dealing with the preferences of handling workflows was about preferring either being led by an assistant or free editing without being led.

It shows, that there is an obvious tendency to free editing and only very few people prefer to be led by an assistant (wizard). This could be a result of the fact that people nowadays are often irritated by assistants (like “Clippy” from Microsoft Office). They rather edit free than be annoyed by a bad assistant.

There is an effect between this question and the motif prestige (graphic on the right). People with stronger motifs for being admired aka with high prestige prefer to be led (F_(1,4099)=35.82; eta=0.488). A possible reason could be that mistakes are more unlikely if you are being led by an assistant. People with greater intentions for prestige would want to avoid mistakes and show good results. Do you have another plausible idea for this result?

Access to functions

The second question was about the quantity of functions in direct access (many toolbars or no toolbars). We could not find a clear result. This does not mean people don’t care about toolbar cluttered interfaces. User interface design should carefully investigate whether or not additional toolbars should be introduced or replaced by other controls. The question probably simply could not be answered seriously by the users.

Interaction

Question three deals with the preference for a configuration via graphical elements (e.g. create a table by dragging rows and columns in a preview) or via textual dialogs (e.g. create a table by entering the number of rows and columns). Graphical dialogs look better and are more intuitive to use by mouse control. Textual dialogs are – once learned – faster by only using the keyboard and offer full functionality.

Although in most software you can configure using textual dialogs, it seems people strongly prefer graphical dialogs (as you can see in the histogram on the left). They are easier to handle than abstract digits.

As shown in the graphs, there is a relation between this question and the motifs power and prestige. People with an average to low power motif mostly prefer textual dialogs (F_(1,4098)=32.84; eta=0.456). What could be a reason for this finding?

People with a higher prestige motif prefer graphical dialogs while people with a lower prestige motif prefer textual dialogs (F_(1,4104)=28.33; eta=0.405). Yet again, this could be a result of the fact that the people with high prestige motif are worried about doing things wrong and therefore go for the easier solution.

A very strong relation can be found with the participant’s age. Older people significantly prefer textual dialogs. The effect is with an effect size of eta=0.742 very relevant. Could this be because older users are more used to textual dialogs? Do you have any other interpretation?

Support

The last question to workflow was about whether one like to get active support through the software or rather only after asking for it. This question is quite close to the question above about wizards and probably reminds people again of annoying pop-ups. 

Again there is a significant effect of age on this preference. Younger people prefer to be actively supported by the software. The older the people are, the more they only want support after asking for it. The effect size of eta=0.762 highlights the relevance of this result. Can you think of a reason for this finding?

As in some other preferences before, again we find a relation between this preference and the motif prestige. People who rate higher on prestige favour active support (F_(1,4108)=44.12; eta=0.567).

Part 3: Individualization

Settings

The next question was about the preferences of individualization when using software. Participants were asked to indicate whether they use the software’s default setting on the one side or configure it individually in accordance to personal preferences on the other side. We asked this question as it not only shows if we should provide more options to individualize: it also tells us something about the real expertise of our participants/users. We would expect more expert users to make more extensive use of individualisation options.

All in all, there is a tendency towards an individual configuration. Surprisingly it shows, that older people seem to be more interested in individual configuration than younger people (F_(1,4027)=85.12; eta=0.802) while we also found that younger people see themselves more as experts. Perhaps younger people overrate their skills or – take it the other way around – older people have excepted the computer to be more complex than one would hope?

Another interesting significant effect is that people with a higher motif for arousal prefer individual configuration (F_(1,4070)=45.12; eta=0.577). Obviously users needs to be a bit adventurous to dare to individualise their software.

Templates

Last but not least we asked, whether the participants prefer to use default formatting or self-created formatting. Again we would expect more advanced users to prefer self-created formatting. So, like in the question above, the answer should tell us something about the expertise of the users. But again, this question does not seem to be easy to answer.

In result it shows that older people prefer self-created formatting (see graph on the left), mostly people between 50 and 60 (F_(1,4020)=74.3; eta=0.761). Did they make bad experience in the past or do the simply have a different need?

Again it shows – like in the question above – that people with high arousal motif use self-created formatting more willingly. The effect size eta=0.476 (F_(1,4060)=34.45) is not overly high, but points at the effect. The reason could be the same as for individual configuration: those people like to be aroused by trying out functions of the software instead of using the same defaults again.

That’s it folks.

These are all results of our survey for now! We will soon give the long awaited management-summary of the findings – hopefully in time for the LibreOffice Conference in Paris.

So we are looking forward to exchange with you – either in person on the conference or in the comments below. Did you like what we did? What should we improve in the next survey? Are there any questions you have and we could try to answer using the data from this survey?

This week we will be doing the Forge 2011 sprint in Madrid – and you have the chance to contribute:

We plan to work on power and network management in KDE and we would be very happy if you would share your experiences with us. We have set-up a small survey that will help us to hopefully do the right things the right way!

The survey in only active until Wednesday, 28th of September. It should take you no more than 5 minutes to fill it out:

CLICK HERE AND PARTICIPATE! (Update: Study offline now – the results are on User Weave )
Update: Sorry, I put the wrong link in before – thanks Markus for noting this.

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

Today we discuss the results of our survey concerning the usage of the six LibreOffice applications. We also show how usage is related to other variables we talked about in the last posts (see volume 1 and volume 2).

Writer is the tool which is used most often, followed by Calc. For us surprisingly infrequently used is Impress. The distance to the least used tools Draw, Base and Math is much smaller than expected.

Summing the results up, we found interesting relations between age, expertise and motifs and the frequency individual applications are used:

• Older people use Base and Calc more often than younger people
• Unemployed and students use Calc less frequently than everyone else
• Calc and Impress are more often used by people with high arousal and power motifs
• People with higher ratings on prestige use Impress more frequently

Knowing these facts can help to improve the different applications. As Base for example is more frequently used by older people it should be designed for older people’s needs and preferences.

Read on to get all details.

Demographics

As discussed in the last post, due to the large amount of data a lot of tests reveal statistical significance. Therefore we use the effect size ‘eta’ to identify the relevant results (as a rule of thumb, eta should be greater than 0.5 to spot a highly relevant finding).

Age

Age shows some interesting effects on the use of the LibreOffice applications. Older people seem to use Base about as often as they use Impress. And the older people are the more often they use Base. This effect size is rather high (eta=0.94). The same seems to be true for Calc. Young people use Calc much less often than older ones. This result could be related to a business need for databases and calculating data sheets. Draw and Writer also show relevant effects (see table 1) that cannot easily be explained. Perhaps the different usage pattern of students (see below) takes an impact here.

Table 1: Statistical analysis of LibreOffice usage by age. Results are sorted by effect size, significant effects in red.

Business

Obviously, unemployed people and students use Calc less frequently. This is probably related to the fact, that Calc is often needed in offices. Many people use it for their jobs (especially people who work in economics, as shown in the graph) rather than privately. So people with no job (and students) don’t need it as often. Another less apparent effect is that people from education and health seem to use Impress more often than people with other professions. Especially for the educational work this is comprehensible, as multimedia presentation are used regularly in schools and universities.

For all other applications there are no major differences between the businesses. This might be influenced by limitations in the question. For example a great amount of participants (almost 20%) indicated that they work in IT which was not present as a single selection option. For the next survey we will improve the options for this question.

Motifs

Most significant findings when looking at the motives and the usage of LibreOffice applications is that higher ratings on the dimensions power and arousal are accompanied by a more frequent use of LibreOffice in general, and Impress and Calc in detail.

Most likely this is related to work issues. People with a higher power motif could be more career-minded, get to higher positions and hence need to use Impress and Calc (and LibreOffice in general) more often. On the other hand it is interesting and does not seem very clear to us why people with a higher arousal motif also use LibreOffice more often. Perhaps this is related to the fact that these people are more outgoing and hence need tools to create and present.

Quite interesting is the fact that people with a high score on prestige use Impress more often. Although the effect size is only medium high (eta=0,39), it shows that presenting is important for people who want to gain recognition. This finding is a good evidence for the validity of motifs as we measured them. As a more humorist comment: people with a higher prestige do not seem to validate the presented results in a greater depth – at least they do not do that with LibreOffice applications.

Table 2: Statistical analysis of LibreOffice usage by motifs. Results are sorted by effect size ‘eta’, significant effects in red.

Our next episode will be about the user’s preferences in using software in general and how they are related to the other variables.

The main results show that

• motifs security and prestige decline linear with age,
• asking users for a self-estimation relevance or expertize does not work out,
• motifs can be used for characterization and description of users.

Read on to get the full details.

Motifs

A very common approach in usability is to create fictional characters to represent different user types within a targeted user group. This methodology is called Personas, promoted e.g. by Alan Cooper [1]. Thus a Persona is meant to stand for a set of users that are expected to use the product in a similar way. These Personas are usually described on dimensions like demographic, attitude, goals or behavior.

Unfortunately Personas are not scientifically proved in any way. They seem to work somehow, but are far away from the insights of the science of psychology in general or differential psychology more specifically. Differential Psychology studies the ways in which individual people differ in their behavior. At the Psychological IT-Consultancy Apliki we want to bring the findings of Psychology into the development of IT products, thus we cannot be satisfied with this situation.

We therefore apply well-established psychological approaches to the field of IT. In this study we are targeting a theory called ‘Zürcher Modell’ by Norbert Bischof [2], better known as ‘motifs’:

Motifs are stable personality traits that show the importance of certain goals for the person. To find out more about our users, we asked them to self-estimate themselves on the five basic motifs that are fundamental to every human being:

• Arousal is the motif of experiencing new and exciting situations.
• Prestige is the motif that describes the intention of being popular and admired by other people.
• (Social) Security is the need of being in secure relationships and not left alone.
• Achievement is the motif of being very fierce to deliver good performances.
• Power is the motif of wanting to take the lead in teams.

To put it short: motifs try to explain why people act at all. Motifs promote a constant set-actual comparison. If e.g. a person with a low set-value in social security is in a crowded situation, this person will most likely try to leave this setting. For more specific reading the book from Bischof [2] is recommended.

In this study we are collecting data on motifs to find out how motifs influence our IT preferences. This addresses questions like: Do people with a high motif for achievement have other preferences in individualization of a software than people with a lower motif for achievement?

There is a well-perceived questionnaire with 25 items for the self-assessment on the five motifs. This is obviously too long for a survey, so we decided to use only one question per motif. We chose the one that rated highest on the motif factor and we considered as most reasonable.

Relations between motifs and independent variables

To check whether the motifs – as we raised them in the survey – are actually usable, we first set them in relation to the independent variables introduced in the last post.

First, we dichotomised the variables expertise, relevance and usage to have a sufficient number of answers for each option. As already mentioned in the last posting, e.g. for expertise, there are only few people consider themselves as beginners and average users, so we put them together in a group we call “less expertise” and those, who consider themselves as experts make up the second group “more expertise”. We did the same for relevance and usage, where the problems were similar in order to the given answer options.

In this article the effect size ‘eta’ will be important. Due to the large data set a lot of statistical tests reveal significance. Therefore, primary attention has to be drawn on the effect size  - an indicator for the relevance or strength of an effect. Commonly, an effect is treated as medium strong if eta is above 0.3 and as high if it exceeds 0.5. We will only discuss results with an effect size over 0.5 to make sure the effects we are talking about are relevant.

Age

The graph (click to enlarge) shows that the variable age is related to the motifs prestige and security. The older the participant is, the lower (s)he rates on these two scales. Thus, younger people (in our sample) have higher motifs of prestige and security than older people. Statistical analysis reveals a strong evidence of these findings with effect sizes of eta=0.87 for security and eta=0.55 for prestige. All numerical results are summarized in table 1. The other three motifs – arousal, achievement and power – prove not to dependent on the age of the participant.

Overall, people seem to relax more when they get older.

Expertise