LibreOffice Icon Test: Where are the women?
Monday, 17 December 2012 by Björn Balazs
More than 3000 users took part in the first two LibreOffice icon tests. The demographics prove us to have gathered reliable data.
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
| Age | Tango (in %) | Oxygen (in %) |
| 0-20 | 7 | 9 |
| 20-30 | 44 | 53 |
| 30-40 | 27 | 24 |
| 40-50 | 13 | 9 |
| 50-60 | 6 | 4 |
| 60+ | 2 | 2 |
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
| Sex | Tango (in %) | Oxygen (in %) |
| Female | 2 | 3 |
| Male | 98 | 97 |
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
| Usage of | Tango (mean; 1=never, 5=daily) |
Oxygen (mean; 1=never, 5=daily) |
| Writer | 3.82 | 3.79 |
| Calc | 3.32 | 3.17 |
| Impress | 2.21 | 2.28 |
| Draw | 1.89 | 1.86 |
| Base | 1.43 | 1.47 |
| Math | 1.65 | 1.75 |
The typical user we reached uses a Linux Machine. Table 4 lists the details.
Table 4: Usage of operating systems
| OS | Tango (in %) | Oxygen (in %) |
| Windows | 21 | 17 |
| Mac OS | 4 | 3 |
| Linux (KDE) | 36 | 42 |
| Linux (Gnome) | 36 | 35 |
| Other | 3 | 4 |
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
| Country | Tango (No. of participants) | Oxygen (No. of participants) |
| Afghanistan | 2 | |
| Albania | 1 | |
| American Samoa | 1 | |
| Andorra | 1 | 1 |
| Argentina | 14 | 106 |
| Armenia | 1 | |
| Australia | 12 | 11 |
| Austria | 14 | 16 |
| Belarus | 7 | 1 |
| Belgium | 21 | 26 |
| Bolivia | 2 | |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 2 | 1 |
| Bouvet Island | 1 | |
| Brazil | 35 | 31 |
| Bulgaria | 1 | |
| Cambodia | 1 | |
| Canada | 30 | 20 |
| Chile | 6 | 36 |
| China | 3 | 3 |
| Cocos (Keeling) Islands | 1 | |
| Colombia | 4 | 49 |
| Costa Rica | 2 | 5 |
| Croatia | 3 | |
| Cuba | 24 | |
| Czech Republic | 16 | 12 |
| Denmark | 35 | 28 |
| Dominica | 1 | |
| Dominican Republic | 5 | |
| Ecuador | 8 | |
| Egypt | 1 | |
| El Salvador | 1 | 17 |
| Estonia | 2 | 3 |
| Ethiopia | 1 | |
| Fiji | 1 | |
| Finland | 8 | 12 |
| France | 105 | 57 |
| French Guiana | 1 | |
| French Polynesia | 2 | |
| Germany | 179 | 172 |
| Gibraltar | 1 | |
| Greece | 4 | 5 |
| Greenland | 1 | 1 |
| Guatemala | 5 | |
| Honduras | 3 | |
| Hong Kong | 1 | 1 |
| Hungary | 12 | 9 |
| Iceland | 2 | 1 |
| India | 10 | 6 |
| Indonesia | 6 | 2 |
| Ireland | 3 | 2 |
| Israel | 44 | 5 |
| Italy | 241 | 35 |
| Jamaica | 1 | |
| Japan | 16 | 11 |
| Jersey | 1 | |
| Kazakhstan | 1 | |
| Kenya | 1 | |
| Latvia | 4 | 2 |
| Lebanon | 1 | 2 |
| Lithuania | 6 | 3 |
| Luxembourg | 1 | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 | 1 |
| Malaysia | 2 | |
| Malta | 1 | |
| Mauritius | 1 | |
| Mexico | 7 | 95 |
| Moldova | 2 | 2 |
| Morocco | 1 | 1 |
| Netherlands | 18 | 37 |
| New Zealand | 3 | 3 |
| Nicaragua | 2 | |
| Niue | 1 | |
| Norway | 5 | 3 |
| Panama | 1 | 5 |
| Paraguay | 1 | |
| Peru | 16 | |
| Poland | 26 | 30 |
| Portugal | 18 | 8 |
| Puerto Rico | 4 | |
| Romania | 11 | 6 |
| Russia | 204 | 237 |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 | |
| Serbia | 1 | 2 |
| Singapore | 1 | |
| Slovakia | 3 | 2 |
| Slovenia | 10 | 9 |
| South Africa | 4 | 2 |
| South Sudan | 1 | |
| Spain | 31 | 179 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 | |
| Sweden | 19 | 13 |
| Switzerland | 19 | 9 |
| Taiwan | 3 | |
| Tanzania | 1 | |
| Thailand | 2 | 1 |
| Turkey | 11 | 7 |
| Ukraine | 37 | 46 |
| United Arab Emirates | 1 | |
| United Kingdom | 55 | 48 |
| United States | 80 | 65 |
| Uruguay | 1 | 8 |
| Uzbekistan | 1 | 1 |
| Venezuela | 15 | |
| Zimbabwe | 1 |
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.
1. uniq
Comment from 18. December 2012 at 06:41
About the female participants: You already complained about this in the presentation of your last icon test. So I asked my girl friend to do the survey, too. Next time, I’ll email to other girls I know, asking them.
I think that’s the way to go. We techies must ask people (girls) we know to help us. Usually, we help them with their computer issues, so that shouldn’t be a problem