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.

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?

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!

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.

Thank you on behalf of the LibreOffice UserExperience Team.

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!

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?

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

In the graphic you can see a slight difference between expertise on the motifs arousal and power. People with lower expertise seem to have higher motifs for being aroused and having power.This result is contradictory to the expectation. On the one hand people who intend to have a lot of power could see themselves not as much as experts as they do need more experience (or power) to feel powerful over the computer.

Summing it up,  we believe the question does not work out. People find it difficult to estimate their own expertise and, more relevant, no one wants to be a beginner. Therefore questions of this kind should not be used in general and will more specifically be excluded from further inspection of our data.

Relevance

Relevance describes whether people consider working on a computer more or less important. It turns out to take a strong effect on all motifs except for security. Detailed statistical analysis prove the strongest effects for achievement (eta=0.85) and power (eta=0.68). The direction of this effect is the same for all four motifs: People for whom working with computers is more important show lower ratings on the motifs.

Again, this is actually a very debatable finding. Do people need lower motives to allow or at least report computer to be important for their lives? Again, we believe this kind of question does not work out in a user survey and thus the data is excluded from further inspection.

Usage

The time spent on the computer shows a slight effect on achievement, power and arousal. People who spend less time using a computer report higher values on these motifs (comparable to expertise).

These effects are not strong (eta < 0.3). Further investigations on the effect of usage on other constructs also proves this variable to be irrelevant. This shows that the time people spend in front of a computer does take a relevant influence. This result should be obvious: You can spend a lot of time playing, reading e-mails or just surfing the web, without gaining any expertise in how a computer works. This variable will therefore be excluded from further investigations.

Statistical analysis

Statistical analysis were computed as linear regression respectively ANOVA between motifs and independent variables. Based on resulting F-value the effect size ‘eta’ was calculated to estimate the relevance of a finding. The explained variance is eta². For example the relation between security and age reveals 76% of the overall variance. All calculations (and graphics) were conducted using R.

Table 1: Statistical analysis of motifs. Red color shows significant results. Eta denotes the effect size.

Last but not least, it is worth to mention – as you can see in all of the graphs – that our sample in general rates above average on all motifs, but especially on achievement. This does not necessarily mean that all of our participants are extremely ambitious. We rather assume the question we chose to assess achievement has been formulated a little too strong. Because of the ceiling effect we decided to exclude this motif from further investigations. We will modify this question in future surveys, in order to move the results more towards the middle of the scale.

Relations between motifs

In the next step of our analysis, we conducted an analysis of configurational frequencies (CFA). The idea of a CFA is to compare the expected frequency of a certain combination of factors with the actually observed frequency. This way we are able to identify patterns in the data that occur significantly more often (they are called ‘types’) and such that occur less often (they are called ‘antitypes’).

In order to do so, we dichotomized the remaining four motifs by average (marked as + for above and − below average values in the following table) for the calculations. Although motif dimensions are assumed as  independent, the question we are trying to answer in the context of motifs is: Do people’s answers show any patterns? A pattern could be something like: high arousal often goes along with low prestige.

The results, as shown in table 2, reveal combinations that characterize about 6% of the population each in average. The deviation from that average is about ±5%. The data thus proves to be suited for a CFA.

In theory the motifs are considered to be independent from each other. The results however show types of low-raters (−−−−) and high-raters (++++). To explain these findings, we assume some people did not answer the motif questions  honestly, but clicked constantly on the left- or right-hand side. As the motif questions feel very personal, this behavior is not too surprising. The following significant antitypes are a consequence of the two strong types.

Summing it up, we expect some unwanted variance in the motifs, which might superimpose other effects in follow-up examinations. But we are confident to have assessed the motifs in a sane way and to be able to continue to work with them.

Table 2: Analysis of configurational frequencies. Minus denotes values below, plus above median. Red color shows significant results.

In the next post we will reveal our findings about the usage of LibreOffice tools.

References

[1]: Cooper, A. (1999). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Sams: Indianapolis.

[2]: Bischof, N. (1975). A systems approach toward the functional connections of attachment and fear. Child Development, 46(4), 801-817.

Summary

As promised, this article is about the first results from the latest LibreOffice (LO) survey. To start with, we will give you an impression about the variables we raised and how they are distributed in the sample. Following on, we will tell you more about the general effects found in the survey and how that can be used to improve LibreOffice.

There will be a couple of posts in this blog dealing with this survey, starting today with a description of the independent variables. Next we will present results of motifs and thereafter such of LO usage. It’s remarkable that a huge number of people (n=5419) answered our questions in about one week, with a fairly good responder quote (~75% completed the survey). Many of them are students with a high self-estimated expertise.

Obviously our users are more than willing to bring in their experience and their wishes into the development of LibreOffice. This is an experience I also gained in many other FLOSS projects. As I discussed with Michael Meeks on the Desktop Summit, we will give LibreOffice users this chance to participate in surveys more easily in future. Read on to get an insight into the results. If you want to analyse anything yourself, we are more than happy to give you access to the data.

Aims

The aims of the study were twofold:

• First, we started usability research for LibreOffice by investigating the target group. Decisions about the direction LO is going to take, need to be based upon knowledge about our users, how they use LO and where they need more support.
• To get a more scientific groundwork into the user research work we introduced the so called “motifs” which are well established in psychology to describe people’s goals [1,2]. Research on motifs was the second purpose of this study.

Methodology

There are independent variables and dependent variables in every survey:

• Independent variables are variables that are given and do not change when other parameters differ (e.g. your origin is fixed and does not change with your preference for keyboard combinations or mouse usage).
• Dependent variables are expected to change in relation to these independent variables.

For the present study we collected some demographic data as independent variable that could be used to divide users into groups. E.g. elder users might have a different approach to use software compared to younger. The demographic data we collected was origin, age, business, expertise in terms of computer use in hours per day, self estimated know-how, and valuation of personnel computer relevance.

As a further independent variable we also raised the participant’s basic motifs. They will be discussed in a follow-up article.

Results: Demographics

Today we present the analysis of the independent demographic variables.

Origin