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Filebrowser Screening Test

In a screening test on file browsing behaviour, 21 participants were interviewed on their habits and preferences regarding file management. Six out of the 21 participants then conducted a usability test with Konqueror, the KDE file manager.

Report Date	January 2006
Usability Engineer	Ellen Reitmayr
Software Version	Konqueror from KDE 3.4
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Accessibility Meets Usability Weekend

In user tests with three partially sighted and two blind users, the accessibility features of KDE and Gnome were tested. As a general conclusion we found that while both KDE and Gnome provide very good tools to make the Linux desktop usable for partially sighted and blind users, they are lacking consistent support among the major desktop applications. In KDE, key applications like the text editor Kate or the shell Konsole did not apply high contrast colour schemes; in Gnome, the contents of crucial tools like the software installation (Ubuntu) could not be read by Gnopernicus and were therefore "invisible" for the blind users.

The Accessibility meets Usability Weekend strengthened the collaboration between accessibility and usability in KDE and resulted in a number of guidelines and concepts.

Report Date	May 2006
Usability Engineers	Ellen Reitmayr and Tina Trillitzsch
Software Version	KDE 3.5 in Ubuntu 5.10
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Amarok Usability Report

After a short heuristic evaluation of Amarok, a total of 41 usability issues were found. Only 8 issues of low severity were found, 11 were marked medium, and the remaining 22 issues considered highly severe.

Most of the issues were related to design flaws. The application was not tested for task-oriented usability. Even though the application functioned properly from a technical perspective, attention should be given to a more aesthetic user interface design in the future.

Report Date	May 2006
Usability Engineer	Chi Shang Cheng
Software Version	Amarok in SVN May 2006
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Kivio User Research

The purpose of this user survey was to get insights into Kivio's major user base, their tasks and needs. Learning more about the usage of diagramming tools, the context of diagram creation and application, as well as the required preciseness were important questions in this scope. Based on this information, the survey should allow us to illustrate typical usage patterns, and to learn about feature relevance and priorities. It should help us to determine if the features planned in the scope of Kivio's redesign are important to users.

Also, the survey aimed at determining the users' opinions about Kivio and evaluate the differences to other diagramming applications. Reasons for prominence and gaps should be identified and considered in the future work on Kivio. Finally, the survey should give us widespread information about users of diagramming applications which may be used for persona creation. This includes where they live, their age and gender, education and how experienced they are with computers and with creating diagrams.

Based on the survey, the major use cases for Kivio were validated, and Personas for the four major user groups were created by means of a cluster analysis.

Report Date	May 2006
Usability Engineers	Ellen Reitmayr and Tina Trillitzsch
Software Version	Not Applicable
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KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines Document Research

The KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) is a document which is meant to be a reference guide to developers and usability specialists. It has a unique audience: developers who are very analytical, adept with technology, and sometimes skeptical about ideas opposite of their own; and usability specialists and designers who know a lot of about users but not so much about code.

A survey and card sorting activity were conducted to gather information about the target users of the document, and their mental model for organizing guidelines-related content.

Report Date	June and July 2006
Usability Engineer	Celeste Lyn Paul
Software Version	Not Applicable
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Kaffeine Usability Report

After a short heuristic evaluation of Kaffeine, a total of 40 usability issues were found. Only 5 issues of high severity were found, 20 were marked medium, and the remaining 15 issues considered lowly severe. Most of the issues were related to unnecessary complexity of the user interface. The application was not tested for task-oriented usability. Even though the application functioned properly from a technical perspective, attention should be given to a more aesthetic user interface design in the future.

Report Date	July 2006
Usability Engineer	Chi Shang Cheng
Software Version	Kaffeine 0.8.1 with the Polyester theme7 and the nuoveXT icon set
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Ideas for a Redesign of What's This Help

The What's This Help is planned to be redesigned for KDE 4. The concept described in this document summarises the considerations of accessibility, documentation and usability people regarding the requirements of a What's This help which is both accessible, discoverable and usable for future users.

Report Date	July 2006
Usability Engineers	Ellen Reitmayr, Olaf Schmidt and Philip Rodrigues
Software Version	Not Applicable
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