Introducing Interaction Designers to the Drupal Community and the Community Design Process

This post is meant to provide some initial pointers to the drupal community and its "ecosystem", for the interaction designers / ixda folk who have just joined us here.

Experiences on Collaborating with the Drupal Community

Two fellow designers, Leisa Reichelt and Mark Boulton, were hired in August 2008 by the Drupal Association to work with the Drupal community on the redesign of the project's home, drupal.org.

• Read Leisa's summary Drupal.org redesign - why is it so? Some insights into our design strategies.
• Read Mark's thoughts about Drupal.org, Design Iterations, and Designing in the open.

Design Patterns / Drupal Interface Guidelines

While Drupal's core culture is rooted in open source development, and is clearly developer-centric, the community at large is well aware of the importance of design and usability best practices.

Several rounds of formal lab usability testing have been conducted. Have a look at some initial results from usability testing.

The community, most notably the usability group, is working hard on paving the road to better usability.

Several initiatives are underway, for example:

• Compose a guide on 'User Interface best practices' and
• Call for a UI design pattern library for drupal.

Please don't hesitate to jump in and contribute, especially if you have expertise in the area! :-)

Mapping Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture

From very early on in Drupal's development, thinking in terms of information architecture has guided Drupal's software development. Most notably Drupal's Taxonomy module set it apart from other open source CMS's early on.

Check out a recent presentation on the topic: From Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture.

Participatory Design & Open Collaboration - Examples

Lastly, I would like to point out some examples of user-centered, participatory design and community design collaboration:

• Drupal.org - come wireframe with me!
• Usability Mockup: Drupal Dashboard
• Views UI mockups

Note, what I mentioned here is by no means an attempt to be a comprehensive list of everything related to design and usability in Drupal. It is simply meant as cursory overview and meant to encourage newcomers to explore the Drupal "universe". Leisa's attempt at defining the community might give you further pointers to the ecosystem: Drupal.org - what makes up Drupal.org Community?

For people interested in design collaboration, I recommend to look at the following groups:

• Design For Drupal
• Designers and Information Architects
• Drupal usability and user experience working group

And last, but not least: Drupalistas, please comment and add any pointers you feel relevant!