UX Open hours in IRC, february 6

Meeting notes: january 23, 2012 Drupal UX open hours in IRC

Updates by dcmistry

dcmistry will be conducting an explorative usability study around orientation and theme installation. The goal of this study is to understand how new users get oriented and use Drupal for the very first time:

• How do first time users orient themselves when they first land on Drupal 7?
• Do understand how to perform the basic tasks like adding a slogan to their website?
• Do users understand how to install a theme and make changes to the theme?

This test is specifically set up to be explorative, the aim is to understand/learn what the participants say and what their natural thought process is. The tasks will be catered to what they think is important to them. Comments welcome.

Usability test by technika

Technicka is preparing another usability study, this one is to take place at Google. The focus is on non-engineering, yet tech-savvy users who have very little exposure to a CMS or manually editing a site with Dreamweaver. Again, the goal is to understand the conceptual hangups people encounter, and where they start to realize Drupal has a steep learning curve.

The study will consist of 1 hour sessions with 6 users, and will be streamed live in a Google+ hangout. Script for this study

Discussing these two studies brought up our lacking personas. We freely use profile labels like 'content creator/editor', 'builder' or 'developer' without really having a clear picture of what those roles mean in terms of experience, skills and the like. It would be worth our while to spend some time pulling some of the existing persona descriptions together and create a single resource to refer to when discussing 'types of users'.

Account UX

Rick Cecil started a big rundown of pain points and use cases for the account registration and user profile UX. We discussed how to approach this interesting design problem and come up with a plan that will help get this chopped up into actionable issues. For some points, issues already exist (look'm up, post them in here).

The general idea: evaluate the account management process and propose a holistic design goal and approach for how to get there, starting with the registration workflow. We'll want to take the main (core) scenarios and map these out in the screens (or touch points) that people encounter when they go through these scenarios.

Topics we didn't tackle this time or were brought up after finishing up

• Analysis of the modules page interviews is ongoing
• Context UX interaction strategy would benefit from a focussed design sprint of sorts
• Rick mentioned the idea of compiling a 'worst of' usability reel to instill empathy
• Lewisnyman is iterating on his mobile admin navigation prototype

Thanks all!

This was an inspired and plain busy meeting. New names are joining the fun that is Drupal UX design :) One of our goals is to grow the team, seems like we are!

The UX testing was very enlightening. Hopefully we can compare notes and come up with a list of specific problem points to focus on?

I'm personally going to see if I can do something useful for the Manage Fields tab in Field UI (http://drupal.org/node/1164812).

I also have a fully functional (if not polished) version of my overhaul for TAC's UI available:
http://drupal.org/node/1314606
I'll probably commit it this weekend (unless someone finds something horribly wrong with it) and open a few followup issues for the parts that are still "unpolished" (like absent help text). I'd love to get some more testing/review for it if there's time on Feb.

Sounds cool. If there is time I'll go over the on going work on the mobile administration prototype.