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.
The purpose of this page is to document these workflow issues so that we can try to understand the extent of the problem Drupal has a rather large challenge as the large user-base diverges in its level of knowledge and ideas for using Drupal; which makes creating the right work flow for everyone difficult.
Identifying problems
We should look for specific user tasks and instead of going through parts of the workflow we should go from step 1 : finding the tasks function to step x : finding the tasks results. Example tasks include:
I want to remove the byline from my pages
I want to enable comments on my blog
I want to add a new forum
We only want to list tasks which research or experience has showed there are workflow issues. We want to list the obvious problems where users get stuck. We are not looking for UI problems that make a task more difficult than it should be (too much clicking, for example), but are instead looking for areas where the user can't figure out where the next step is; or even where the first step is.
Please help. This is a wiki!
Resources:
http://www.cooper.com/insights/journal_of_design/articles/going_with_the...
Problems
- Enable user pictures for displaying in posts – Enables user pictures without a problem, but does not know to go to admin/build/themes/settings to actually display them in a post.
- Install a contributed module. After enabling a module, what is the next strep? The user needs to know the concept of the mode (in more detail than on the project page), what permissions and settings are available, what other tasks should be performed (e.g. create content type, create role, etc.) to install the module. Currently there is no indication whether the module has it's own permissions or where the settings page/s is/are.
- Where is my content? - It's easy to create content, thanks to the link at the top of the admin block. But it's also easy to overlook the settings hidden in the collapsible fieldsets, so new users may end up creating a content without giving it a menu item, a taxonomy, or promotion. Of course there's a contents list but it's buried three levels down into administer/content management/content, which is not obvious when you're not used to the admin interface.
- Clicking a link for help in the middle of a form means users risk losing the content of that form.
- The welcome text explaining how to set up the site disappears as soon as content is published to the front page.
- Users can't easily find how to change the default contents of the front page. The setting to change this is stuck at the bottom of admin/settings/site-information. On the other hand, sometimes content gets published there (when content is promoted) and they don't quite understand why.
- A module (search for example) seems to be working, but when the user logs out it ceases to work. Permissions are pretty straight forward to fix, but only when the user realises that this is the problem
- User disables login box or puts the site into offline mode. Now they don't know how to log back in. We've trained them to use something that can disappear.