Drupal.org Redesign Business Objectives
These objectives were developed by Michael Meyers and Laura Scott of the Drupal association.
OVERVIEW:
Writing objectives at the start of a project gives you a solid foundation – a set of clearly defined goals that should guide every step of the initiative. This shouldn’t be about “HOW” we’ll accomplish the redesign (specifics like “ratings for modules” or “we need a CDN to improve site performance”) this is a higher level outline of “WHAT” we need to accomplish (“improve site availability and performance”).
After you have established your objectives, you can then determine the best way to achieve them. Throughout the redesign project, when we come up with these ideas (the “how”) we should constantly ask, “does [this idea] help meet one or more of our business objectives?” and if it doesn’t we shouldn’t be doing it! At the end of the project or a specific phase, these objectives will be used to measure our success or failure – did we meet our objectives?
It’s said that good business objective are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Agreeable, Realistic, and Trackable.
The objectives outlined below are more abstract then SMART and are meant to build consensus in the community. Also, note that any examples of HOW we might work to achieve objectives were provided only to provide context – they are not meant as recommendations or endorsements of any particular idea and are outside the scope of our current goal.
Once we agree on the high level objectives we can then create more specific and measurable ones (i.e. “increase repeat visitors by 20%” vs. “make the site more sticky”, “sub 2 second page load times” vs. “make the site faster”) and THEN we can turn our focus to the how…
OBJECTIVES (in no particular order):
Modernize the Aesthetics and GUI, Leverage the Power of Drupal.
The current site design is stale - web aesthetics have come a long way and so the site does not inspire confidence in terms of professionalism. It also poorly represents the power and modern capabilities of Drupal - it barely takes advantage of the functionality Drupal has to offer.
We need a cleaner, updated look and feel (design) in-line with current market trends, implemented consistently across all of the association properties (association, groups, d.o, etc.). A more appealing, modern, and usable set of sites will make for a much more marketable Drupal.
Re-think of the Information Architecture and Usability
There is inconsistent architecture and it's hard to find information. We need to step back and look at our many properties and re-think the overall structure and organization of the individual sites and re-build from a solid, new foundation. The navigation and IA needs to be more intuitive and approachable, and the various sites or sections of sites need to be more tightly integrated and cross linked.
Important pages shouldn’t be more then two clicks away, we need to leverage non hierarchical ways of organizing content (tagging and improved searching) and there should be consistency in the placement of navigation elements.
We need to cross link and integrate various aspects of the site – for example, when you view a module there should be blocks showing recent related activity on the forums, in docs, issues, etc., with a link to a full rundown (and not like the links we have on project nodes).
We need to introduce missing and important functionality that is found on most successful community sites (trust and credibility metrics, popularity and ratings, etc.).
Contain Expenses and Generate Revenue
Revenue is essential for sustainability but the site does not exist first and foremost to generate revenue – that would change the purpose and tone of the site. We don’t want to overly commercialize the site - we want to find palatable ways of monetizing our properties to generate necessary ongoing revenue that will help fund this redesign, the associations operating costs, and future initiatives.
Increase user participation throughout all aspects of the project (documentation, testing, design, development, etc.)
The Drupal community makes use of social production, which relies on many users contributing to the project. In order to continue to make improvements, we need to continue to make it easier to contribute.
The size of the community activity makes highlighting and parsing that activity very difficult. Participation is easy in some areas, but hard in others. It's hard for people to know where to start, or how to best contribute. The only area where it seems to go well is in actual code contributions.
It’s critical we continue to grow the community - we need to solicit (calls to action) and foster more participation, make it significantly easier for folks to contribute (lower the barriers to entry, provide starting points), etc. It also needs to be easier to follow what’s going on day to day or month to month (in summary), and be more welcoming and transparent to newcomers, outsiders, and the more casual users or evaluators.
Empower and Leverage Drupal Community Members (Crowdsourcing)
We need to empower our member base and leverage their input to improve the quality of, and to help organize the ever growing amount of content and contributions.
For example, we should be tracking the number of views or downloads, and have some type of rating system. We can then enable filtering and sorting based on these metrics, making it easier to find content. We also need to encourage people to add metadata like tags – helping to better organize things – we should encourage as much user editable content as possible.
Facilitate the Product Evaluation Process
Most companies and individuals go through a similar evaluation process prior to adoption – there are common questions and concerns.
Does Drupal have the features I need?
How does it compare to other frameworks or CMS systems?
Who else uses it? Will it scale?
Will I be able to find development resources?
etc.
We need to support and facilitate this process making it easier for the various constituents to evaluate our product.
Increase Downloads and Grow the Install-base
Success is driven by our community and active successful installations of the product – we need to increase downloads, and more importantly increase our conversion rate (folks who just download vs. those who actually continue to use it and find success through it) to build our install base of active users.
Improved, Better Integrated, and More Comprehensive Documentation
Great strides have been made in this area but we need to continue the progress on this critical front.
We need to improve the structure and organization: All docs should be versioned with the appropriate Drupal release. Taxonomy can be leveraged to organize content on more than one axis. Type of documentation, for example: tutorial, review, guidelines, introduction, etc.
We nee to provide better integration (cross linking and referencing), for example help links in the Drupal install process should link users to specific help pages, not the documentation home page.
We need to increase the overall quality of the content, provide deeper and greater coverage of topics, establish and improve standards for all types of documentation, etc.
Make it Easier to Setup, Run, and Support Drupal Installations
Whether your are looking for documentation, modules that best meet your needs, tips on tuning and scaling your configuring, testimonials and tutorials, etc. it needs to be much easier to find what you are looking for.
Improve the Performance and Availability of our Properties
The availability and performance of our properties directly reflect the viability of the product and form an indelible impression of our capabilities. If a users or evaluators go to one of our sites and it’s slow or down, they will wonder if Drupal can scale, if it’s right for their business, etc. It also directly hampers community contributions, time spent on site, etc.
We also need to ensure critical information (api.drupal.org, handbook documentation, etc.) and product downloads (core, modules, themes, etc.) are /always/ available, that we set, track, and meet performance standards (i.e. sub 2 second page load times), and have the necessary tools to monitor and measure our performance.
Internationalization
Drupal caters to an international audience. Our web properties should be available in multiple languages.
MarComm - Promoting the Product and Brand
We need to maximize SEO and have an actionable marketing strategy to go along with this redesign - including supporting collateral to empower grass roots campaigns and viral promotion (buttons, banners, badges, broiler plate copy, etc.)
Insight and Analysis
We have limited insight into site usage. We need a modern real-time analytics solution in place to help us better understand how users navigate the site, what areas are important to them so that we can make informed decisions.