11 usability principles for CMS products

Good article, and while Drupal is actually capable of addressing most of these points, it does not do so out of the box, which is probably the greatest struggle a new user goes through. A good example of this are user roles. After a fresh install, drupal comes with three user roles: admin, authenticated user, and anonymous user. The only difference between the authenticated and anonymous user is that the authenticated user can post comments. So the first step is always to create an author role, because even if you're the only one publishing content, you don't want to do that as the super user, because - like the article says - you just have way too many options available at any one time.

Now, the obvious first improvement would be to provide a default author role instead of having to set the permissions for the new role by going through a huge page with hundreds of check boxes for modules that aren't at all related to the role I'm creating. I'm creating an author, so I care about content, not about all the other modules. For each content-type that I'm creating from there on, I'll have to goto the permissions and enable write/edit/delete permissions for both "all" and "own" content. It quickly becomes a nightmare, especially once you have installed a bunch of contributed modules that all add clutter to the permissions screen. Ideally, these permissions should be set in the context of enabling a module or creating a content type. So if I'm creating a new content-type I can tell it right away that authors should be able to create it, and edit and delete their own content, but not others. That should already be the default, because it's the most common scenario.

Regarding the task based approach, this too can be improved. We have a task for "Create Content", which is good. We also have a hierarchical list of tasks for administrators. And, we can also create new tasks for particular roles by adding links to the navigation menu. However, that last step is implicit. All we do is creating a link to a page and it shows up based on permissions. If you really think your site through in terms of tasks that you want your different user roles to perform, why not make it explicit?

There's more to a task than access to a page. A task has a flow attached to it and usually consists of several steps. I can measure a task's success by looking at whether or not it has been completed. A complex task can be done in phases and the user never loses his work. All of these things currently need to be considered by the admin and are achieved by going through a number of configuration steps on different screens in the application. Let's walk through a typical example:

I want a role of author who can create certain content-types. I trust them with some content type, so that content will be published right away. Some other content type is deemed too important to publish without approval, so I need a slightly more complex work flow. Some content can be deleted and edited at will, others should go through a revision. When content of a certain type is created I want to know about it, so I can decide whether or not it should be promoted to front page status. Sounds easy enough, right? Now let's look at the steps involved to make this happen:

1. Create at least two content types. We could re-use the story, page, or blog types, but they differ in various attributes that I'd all have to consider and change around so that they no longer match their intended purpose, so it's best to start from scratch. For one of them I enable revisions and uncheck "publish", the other keeps the defaults. This is all done in admin/content/types.

2. Create a new role. Note that we couldn't do that the other way around, because we need to set permissions for all the content types we just created. This is done in admin/user/roles.

3. Now we need to set permissions in admin/user/permissions. I'll go through the painful process of scanning all the check boxes and check "create content type 1", "edit own content-type 1", "delete own content type 1", "create content type 2", "edit own content-type 2", "delete own content type 2", figure out that for revisions to work with content type 2 I also need to give that role "view revisions" and "revert revisions".

4. The task flows still aren't complete. In order to get notified for one content type post I need to install the Actions module or a contrib module like Rules. Even though notifications are conceptually part of the workflow, we don't set this up in the workflow section of the content type, but in the module's own Actions interface. How to do this varies based on which module we use.

5. Are we done yet? Nope, we want a quick way for the author to create these new content types, so we'll go to admin/build/menu-customize/navigation, disable the "create content" menu and move the "create content-type 1" and "create content-type 2" menus a level up. Alas, this menu now looks good for authors, but what about other user roles with access to different content types? Easiest way to deal with it is by leaving them where they are and check the "expand" box for the "create content" parent item. Not quite what I wanted, but at this point I'm ready to make compromises.

6. We're done, but in order to know that I have to mentally go through all the steps of the task and see if it maps. At this point, I create a new author user and test the flow, because that's really the only way to see if we missed anything.

Now those were two simple content-types, with a single form, and the same publishing rules for all roles. It gets more complex when other users can create the same content type but we want a different work flow. Again, we don't modify the flow directly but implicitly, by making changes to the permissions section and hope that the right fields show up on the form. It gets even more complex when we need flows that span different forms. There's an intricate web of interactions that you influence by a combination of workflow, permissions, and content-types. To get a multi-step task spanning different content types and a single workflow working, it needs some sheer wizardry, or at least a lot of experience.

As an admin, I would like to create a task for a user role, and define the flow and what constitutes a task completion, all in one go. Let me break up a task in steps, measure completeness of each step, and allow the user to pick up where he left off. Make it easy to attach the task to the navigation menu. When I add a new content-type, don't make me go through the same steps all over again. Let me modify the task instead.