Usability

There are numerous usability issues centred around the administration of nodes. Of particular interest in this discussion is the admin/content/node page. The aim of the discussion is to identify the problems, propose solutions and then break those solutions down into specific tasks that we can put into the issue queue.

The discussion really began at http://groups.drupal.org/node/12507#comment-40213, and so the points made there are summarised below. (An issue has also been created at http://drupal.org/node/270912, but we will probably have to implement several issues to fix this.)

The plan is to solve the following problems:

• New installations provide a set of instructions on how to set up a site. But this disappears as soon as you put something on the front page.
• When users upload content, they frequently lose it
• When new things happen on the site (e.g. actions are triggered, comments get posted), users have to click all around the place to find out what has happened.
• There is very little distinction between a site builder and a site administrator.

Administrator or Site builder or Both

Attached are the results from the usability study I did for at the University of Baltimore. This was for the Research Methods class with Professor Kathryn Summers - we did usability testing with an eyetracker and looked at the results.

Vast progress on Inline/Wysiwyg API:

After digging through TinyMCE module's issue queue and finding some RTBC patches containing major improvements to the module, languishing in the queue for more than one year (!), I decided to fork TinyMCE module into Wysiwyg Editor module. Most importantly, I've implemented Nedjo's patch to use jQuery to initialize the editor. This was an important step in the right direction, because Wysiwyg's goal is to support not only TinyMCE in the future.

However, for now the most exciting new feature is: I've re-rolled my hook_wysiwyg_plugin() patch, which allows any module in contrib to add its editor plugins to the editor configuration. So the time of installation steps like the following in Image Assist's README.txt is finally over now:

We know we have a workflow issue when a user mutters "what do I do now!?" and spends the following ten minutes looking through random menus looking for an answer. A user will also frequently declare themselves 'stupid' once they find what to do; how did they miss this one simple step? But this is not down to stupid users; it is a design problem. Drupal has too many of these problems and we need to fix them.

Continuing discussion from http://groups.drupal.org/node/11011

I have exchanged a number of emails with a reseller of Morae in Australia (they cover sales in my geographic region). They say there are no academic or non-profit discount on Morae. I didn't ask about bulk-purchase. It would be interesting to see if Techsmith (or their US reseller) also says this. Prices they quoted were in AUD and approximately equivalent of those published in USD on http://www.techsmith.com/purchase/default.asp

There may have been discussion about this before, but I'm not aware of it. I know there's a similar discussion about the word "node."

Something I like to do just to see how "usable" my site is, is to watch someone register and try to use the site without giving them any help. I was doing this the other day, and a user went to edit her profile. Everything was fine until she got down to the section where you can enable or disable blocks; she just skipped it. I asked why, and she said she was confused; she thought "blocks" would "block" information.

I'm a GSoC student for 2008. My project is Usability Testing Suite and I have created a flow for how I think it should work and would like feedback as to the viability of it.

Please comment on the issue, not this discussion.

Thanks.

Project schedule and status: http://groups.drupal.org/node/11011

Access Control Page does its Job - one big scrolling Motogp, but at least serial and logical. Still I hate scrolling and like the idea of how much can be put on one page but still distinguishible. For Comparison check Joomla Admin pages - they overdo it, in my opinion, but it is amazing how much you can physically put on a page just by use of smaller fonts and color coding. So this is what I basically use.

I just opened up two issues:

• Default tags vocabulary
  *'Advanced' install profile

The idea is to get more dummy content into the default profile, whilst at the same time provide a stripped down profile for people who don't need it. The question is, what else could we put in the default profile if we're able to bloat it a little?

Enable more modules? Which ones?
Dummy content in page nodes and dummy primary links pointing to them?
Dummy article posted to the front page?

So, for GSoC, my project is, for lack of a better name, Plugin Manager.

It's designed to retrieve a list of all modules and themes available for the version of Drupal that a server is using. It then allows the Drupal administrator to automatically retrieve and install the modules and themes they desire (as well as their dependencies). Just to be perfectly honest, the group that I want to cater to the most is the group that wants a website and has no idea what tar.gz means.

Taking a look at the support forums in response to http://www.elvisblogs.org/drupal/quicker-drupal-adoption-10-minute-chall..., it occurred to me that it's a prime place to find usability issues. So I figure a thread for posting them up might be worthwhile. Fixable ones should probably be accompanied by an issue nid as well:

Here's one to start:

Edit any page permission doesn't allow you to edit any page:
Forum topic: http://drupal.org/node/261498
Issue: TODO

I've come up against a usability problem that I think is caused by a problem in Drupal's data model.

Example of problem: When setting block visibility settings, it is impossible (without writing custom php), to make a block visible to authenticated users who have no other role, if you don't want that block to show to all authenticated users. In other words, you may want to show the block to all authenticated users except those of belonging to role x. No can do without php.

This usability aims page was initially written as a subsection of a page in April, 2005. http://drupal.org/usability-aims

During the preparation for Drupalcon Boston, Neil, Dries, and I spoke with Jared Spool who challenged the Drupal project to establish two practices to improve our user experience. First, he recommended we need to establish our user experience goals, and second we need to watch our users use Drupal every six weeks.

Still not sure why usability testing is important? See what a linux hobbyist found in an informal usability test on Ubuntu.

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

[Continue reading on my blog at CivicActions: civicactions.com/blog/scaling_up_usability_testing_in_drupal]

First, for those that don't want to read the full post, here's the "30-second elevator speech":
This post to to discuss using Seleinum with Drupal. Specifically using Maven to run the selenium tests and writing the Selenium tests in Java.
The example code be downloaded from the Workhabit Inc. public repository here: https://svn.workhabit.com/svn/public/drupal/selenium/trunk
One must have the following installed to run:
1. Firefox
2. Java 1.5+
3. Maven
All 3 are easy to install and aquire. Once you download the code from the repository, you can just navigate to the directory and run:

There have been a few rounds of discussions on Drupal UX goals/principles this past year, so I thought this announcement would be of interest to the community:

"Late in 2007, our User Experience (UX) group—which does user interface design, visual design, user research, web development, and user interface writing—set out to articulate the principles that ought to guide Google designs worldwide. What are the fundamentals that all Google designers and researchers accept? Which approaches to design are particularly "Googley"? How can we encourage teams throughout Google to dream big and make smart design decisions?"

og_panels is here! And when I look at this http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo I gotta say, I get a little envious... With being quite some design people here in this group this page should rather look that good.

And it is not only about eye-candy: make the information better accessible by introducing more blocks. I volunteer to provide mockups and do the stuff. But I think we depend on Neill Drumm to get things rolling...

Ah, and that's not all. Look here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10445

Add Display Name field(s) to core in addition to Username is a D7 feature request. This document assists advocators to bring clarity and structure to the proposal and formulate design requirements to pass to core developers. So, add to this page.

Project information

Project: http://drupal.org/project/uts
Status: Design and implement pluggable API for export, post-processing of data, and analysis. (Data analysis API)

Description

Provide a method of measuring the user experience which has been stated as a very important goal of Drupal. In Dries' keynote he detailed the results of the usability testing and stressed that we should "Continue to make Drupal easier to use." This project will provide a suite of usability testing tools that will allow data to be recorded and analyzed in order to make improvements to Drupal's usability.

Additional Reading:

• GSoC Project Idea: Usability Test Suite
• Proposal

It doesn't seem to make sense to me that the collapsable areas on the modules page are open by default?

If you have lots of modules installed then you spend most of your time closing sections or just using the browsers find feature to find what you need.

On that same note it would be nice (don't know of it does this already) if you could organize modules in folders on your server and have them show up as a collapsable area. for example I could put all my SEO modules in a folder and have a SEO collapsable section.

just a thought.

Andy and Selena produced a video that does a really great comparison between Wordpress and Drupal.

They talk a lot about the usability pitfalls that Drupal runs into, and how Wordpress focuses on users while Drupal focuses on Developers, and what that means for the communities that the users are interacting with. There is a lot about Drupal from a usability perspective in this video, especially in the admin interfaces, and a bit about drupal.org.

All in all, they have a lot of pretty interesting observations.

The video is 18 minutes and starts off a bit slow, but it’s definitely worth checking out:

Hi all!
As a part of my course on Usability Design at the University of Leuven (Belgium), I'm doing a user and task analysis on Drupal.
I have started a user survey to collect useful data on the users of Drupal. With this data, I will create user profiles and personas to reflect some typical user groups of Drupal.

The survey can be found here: http://drupalsurvey.vanisterdael.be/index.php?sid=76524

Why are the "Administration Theme" settings are located in "Administer -> Site Configuration" area, rather than with all of the other theme settings in "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes".

The only unique configuration option that is in the "Administration Theme" menu is the "Use admin. theme for content editing" checkbox -- and this could simply be moved to the bottom of the list of themes in the "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes" menu. It seems unnecessary for this single option to have it's own section in the administration menu.

An update on usability testing at the University of Baltimore - I ended up putting together a very simple scenario involving page creation, navigation and permissions using the IRT node form - vertical tabs layout. I've tested this script in a session with our campus webmaster, and he was able to complete the tasks within the hour we had, but did have a couple problems. If you have any thoughts on the script, please post.

Better node admin content form module looks like a promising initiative to improve usability on the admin content page, despite the awkward name.

As does Form Table module which going by the description, appears to be implementing a project idea I had had for SoU:

Becca Scollan posted briefly here about a student project where they are considering doing some usability testing with Drupal at the University of Baltimore, which has the possibility to be expanded further in the summer. There are some preparation time constraints that at this point are leading her group to do consider completely replicating the scenario that was done at UMN, and it would be nice if some of the other admin test cases and tasks were fleshed out a bit more so that some new ground could be explored and to streamline the process a bit better.

There was talk at the UMN Usability session at Drupalcon that it would have been beneficial to set up the users with an initial "easy win" task that boosted their confidence -- like setting up an "About Us" page with a primary navigation link at the top. Webchick also pointed out that there were a number of task ideas that were discussed on this wiki page that were not executed, and that are still listed there with strikeout markup.

The intention of this wiki page is to flesh out some potential admin-related user scenarios that could be used now with this potential opportunity at the University of Baltimore. It could also serve as a general brainstorming place to flesh out other usability scenarios to be tested with other usability lab time as it becomes available.

Hi everyone,

Just reading through "Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries" and pulled this quote on current needs - -

"We want to see this happening more. The first goal is to measure the user experience, and not guess about it. One of the ways we can measure it is with usability testing, but we need labs and people to observe, facilitators to run the lab, and then interviewers to debrief the evaluators, and then resources to get everyone to the lab." (I think from Bevan Rudge)

Hi!

I make a module and implement hook_menu. Now I want to change the path for my module in navigation menu. I changed into code but it is to the old path. Can anybody help me to refresh the new path?
My old path is $items['admin/mybook'] and for new path I want $items['mybook']

Thank's for any help.

mihai

The finalized report documents just came in:

• Summary Report
• Issues Identification Matrix
• Issues Identification Matrix - Reordered

It might be obvious to some of you, but to me it certainly wasn't, so I thought a short link might be a good idea as most of you probably don't lurk around on Planet KDE or Planet Ubuntu. Do read usability professional Celeste Paul's refreshing realization:

• The #1 Problem in OSS Usability and What I'm Going to Do About It
• Short follow-up: Leadership is a problem but not the problem

First post here in this group, so a warm "Hi!" to everyone!

The background

Interesting application of vertical tabs.

Interesting idea of self-assessing a website for usability.

http://www.vkistudios.com/usability_assessment.cfm

I've long since been frustrated about the bad usability of the admin parts of Drupal. While incremental improvements are constantly made, it seems that a big overhaul is necessary in order to move forward. I find it very inspirational to see how Wordpress has hired HappyCog to work on an improved admin interface, based on interviews, research and usability testing. There are some obvious lessons that Drupal can learn from this as well, both from their methods as well as the results. There's a lot of momentum in the community right now to make similar efforts, and I'd be happy to apply as a student to work on this during the summer.

I propose a module that provides both an input filter and a widget used on the node edit form.

The filter would contain the path to an image file and the name or id of an imagecache preset.

The widget would allow the user to view images that exist on the site, and select which one should be inserted into the node body at a particular point, along with the preset that should apply to the display of this image. The widget would place the appropriate tag to be consumed by the filter when the node is rendered.

For anyone not on the Development list serve, there is a great discussion going on about module duplication, "scratch your itch" versus "control the chaos" approaches.

Less than 24 hours in, there are 30 posts. Really thoughtful stuff.

The first post is at: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-March/029249.html

In Dries' talk at DrupalCon Boston, he mentioned the need to remove code from core as well as add functionality. He specifically mentioned proposals to remove the throttle and ping modules from core.

Removing functionality is often an important thing to do regarding usability, and so I thought I'd raise this here.

I've just added an issue to the D7 queue a proposal to remove the "blog-it" functionality from aggregator.module. I've laid out all the arguments there. Please jump in and +1 it or argue otherwise.

With all the recent discussion about usability (also pushed on by the recent usabilty testing) I'd like to make a suggestion.

First, I'll outline two simple examples that I want to draw on (and don't run away at the offensive words!)

Microsft Word (and other word processors)

Ok, icon drawing time! Here's my suggestions for some specs and guidelines to get started with. All feedback welcome.

In the attachment:

• an icon template file for Inkscape
• basic directory structure for organising and categorisation of the icon sources and png renders.

The directories are mostly empty, but have a look in the applications and the mimetypes folder, there are SVG files for:

• forum icons
• calendar icons
• mimetype icons (with PSD sources for 16 and 32px versions which are actually further developed then the SVG!)

There's several simultaneous discussions going on about content types / node types - the terminology at that high level, and in terms of how we explain particular node types like "book page", "page" etc. and individual nodes/posts. So I'm starting this to try to draw some of them together.

Added to official ideas list at http://drupal.org/node/234746

GSoC Project idea: Suggested and discussed at UMN after Usability Testing as a way of Measuring the UX (user experience), and further discussed with Jimmy Berry, who is interested in taking this on as a student. Measuring the UX is the primary UX goal for Drupal.

This needs more work, but is a starting point for a project proposal.

Glossary:

• 'data' refers to user-input text and feedback, logs, video and audio

Reading the presentation Dries posted on his site (http://buytaert.net/files/usability-testing-minnesota.pdf) I saw a lot of my own thoughts regarding the usability obstacles in Drupal echoed. Thank you all involved for all the efforts that have gone into doing usability research on Drupal. I believe the results we're seeing are invaluable.

I'm posting this as my own reflections on what I've seen and reflected over so far. It's opinion and not statement of fact and I'd like to hear your opinion on the issues I discuss below.

Hi,

I came across this web site and thought i would pass this along. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ one article jumped out at me - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html shows eye tracking / heat map of users who were tasked with finding the population of a country -- and the 86% of users failed to find the information - i have not read the other articles but i will be reviewing them over the next couple of weeks to see if there is anything else that jumps out at me.

Smile
Sharon

I want to have a user Dashboard page, like in WordPress. After logged-in, user will see appropriate, stylish and easy-to-use links and panels. This should improve Drupal usability.

Drupal.org will see a huge overhaul one day - at least I hope so. Always having an eye for the competition may help. Interfacewise one can always look what Joomla does. http://extensions.joomla.org

I gotta say - it is so simple to present a lot of content in a still manageable way. Four Columns with Categories, two blocks with newest and most popular modules on top, and here you go. Could be a sample for other pages as well. I'm thinking of access control page and modules page in the drupal admin section.

I am looking of a way to increase stickness to my Drupal powered business index.
Light games seem like an interesting option.

Some ideas:
1. Random picture => identify the business.
2. Weekly Polls with Prizes.
3. Crossword / Puzzle module (e.g. like here).
4. Complete tasks to earn points.

Which modules do you recommend?
And do you have other game ideas which encourage stickness?

Thanks in advance,

Amnon