Monday December 17th, 2012 by Heiko Tietze and Björn Balazs

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.