I want to get serious about redoing the information architecture of Drupal. To be frank, it's a problem. Users don't know what's structure and whats content. Neither do we. I see developers all the time asking where their modules belong.
You might have seen Dharmesh's post on our Toolbar redesign. The design team at Acquia explored many options, ultimately landing on a IA that was preferred by 7 out of 7 users. When posting about this, we had some pushback from the community. I'd like to vet those issues here, to see whether they are real or opinions. Ideally, I'd like us to recognize that this approach is proven to be better. And as such, we could strive for even better/perfect (although 7 out of 7 users preferring this IA/Toolbar to the old is pretty darn good), but hopefully that won't be at the cost of failing to get this better IA into Drupal 8.
The IA and toolbar are in use on my own personal site (as a prototype), and I have to say that I find it sooo much easier to find things and get around quickly. The toolbar has some state issues, but the IA is solid.
To be clear about goals of the IA they were to:
- Reduce intimidation by reducing top level items. New people instantly think Drupal is hard because there are 8 choices (plus a home button)
- Solve the Content vs Structure problem. Are blocks content or structure? A page? A forum? Taxonmy terms?
The IA is as follows:
- Home (as icon)
- Dashboard (as icon)
- Content
- List: all created content types
- Find: Content | Comments | Media
- People
- Add people
- Manage: Permissions | Roles
- Find people
- Site
- Manage: Blocks | Contact Forms | Content Types | Forums | Menus | Views
- Modules | Configure
- Reports
- Appearance
This IA plays out like this:
https://skitch.com/jeffnoyes/8snji/adobe-fireworks-cs5.1
Two points worth mentioning:
1. I've left out shortcuts
A) because I think they're non-sensical (I can also bookbark/bookmarklet in my browser
C) we could, if we must, add a bookmark icon next to the home button.
B) The goal is to restrict features to limit intimidation. IMO, Bookmarks are not valuable enough to keep.
2. Although I've included a skitch of how this plays out in the design, try to separate functionality from design.
Comments
First impression
Overall, I like this a lot. A few questions:
1) Content->Add: How do you handle a site with say 30 content types?
2) Site->Manage: I think this could get long too, depending on which contrib modules are being used (Panels, Rules, Commerce, Organic groups, etc.). Most module configuration should probably be in Site->Configuration, but as a developer, I've never been totally clear on what's "configuration" vs. "manage" (or "structure" in d7).
3) For something like Commerce module, where would you put stuff like Products (of which there can be different user-created types, similar to content types, but products are different than content, or at least the Commerce maintainers think so) and Orders?
4) Why are "modules" and "configuration" orphaned rather than in a named subsection? I'm not sure if that's an IA or design question, so please ignore if the latter, since you asked to not get feedback on that at this time.
effulgentsia, answers to your
effulgentsia, answers to your questions
They stack under Content. You might be mixing toolbar with IA. In this toolbar, you can have a horiztonal view (shown) which stacks all content types horizontally, wrapping many to the next line, or vertical which stacks on top. In a perfect world, I'd like the list to be smart so that only the 10 most used content types are shown, with a more link to show the rest.
Yup, it could. The primary question to ask is how many are shown in the beginning state, and how many are shown on an average or common installation of Drupal. I imagine I could get this information within Acquia. Based on Acquia.com - which is a complex website, the IA works well. Another point of clarity, the list is presently listing what's shown under Structure. So if there is a problem with complex sites, that same problem exists today.
Commerce might want it's own category. Content | Commerce | People | Site | etc. This IA affords additional categories given that it's several items smaller. Alternatively, Products and Orders could go under site in that a Site can enable products that you can further manipulate (see analogy below)
Modules and config are separated just to distinguish them differently. The analogy for this IA break down is...
A) Tools you've enabled that you can use to further manipulate your site (content types, views, forums, etc)
B) Global impacting features: More tools you can add (modules) | Settings for tools you have added (config)
C) Global analysis of your Site
Structure vs presentation changes
This new toolbar is a very good replacement for the current toolbar.
Lots of feedback re this toolbar is in the original Dharmesh's post - would be good to have some sum-up in this post's body (items search box, 'Configuration' instead of 'Site' etc. - please read the comments to that post).
My questions are:
1) Will this new toolbar replace default toolbar or will be a standalone module? If replace - which version of Drupal is it intended to be implemented in?
2) By changing IA do you mean actual changing of all config pages/path/structure or just have a replacement of current toolbar with new module that will just 'suck-in' required items from existing menus (like admin_menu does).
3) Is there any live prototype or dev module? If not, is it already a time for anyone (say, me) to start this project at least as a sandbox module and develop it in parallel with this discussion? Or it is too early to do this at this stage of discussion?
Thanks for bringing this topic.
Reply please
@Noyz
Could you please reply to my questions?
The idea of shortcuts
I really like the idea behind the new toolbar and the IA is definite improvement (yeah for no more content vs structure issues!)
To defend the idea of shortcuts a little. I agree that the current implementation of them is a little non-sensical. They do, however, have a use case when you have a user (or usually multiple users of a certain role) who preforms very few tasks. For them the toolbar can be overkill and shortcuts work as a great, simple way to navigate round the site.
Our current implementation has shortcuts and the toolbar together and you can't have shortcuts without the toolbar. A simple solution would be to split shortcuts from the toolbar. To my mind people who use the toolbar rarely need shortcuts and vice versa.
Mobile first design
Maybe this is helpful, maybe not.
Maybe we should using something like http://srobbin.com/jquery-plugins/pageslide/
ex. screenshot http://meer.li/designs/menu-concept
Each Top Level menu item would be in a horizontal bar with icons. When the icons are clicked it would trigger the pageslide.
The vertical nature of the pageslide would work better for mobile and responsive websites. It would also deal better with areas that need more screen space, ex. content types and long lists.
Maybe we can also push for more a flatter hierarchy with the top level items being task/action based words.
Each Top level item would have a search to filter input below it. See http://meer.li/designs/menu-concept
Example
Add New
--Content (This is emphasized)
----Image Gallery
----Job Posting
----Blog Post
----Article
--Block
----Bean
--Content Type
--Menu
--Menu Item
--Feature
--Flag
--Field
--Theme
--View
--Basically anything that you can add to Drupal
Configure
--Site Information
--Permissions
--Roles
--Module Name
--Module Name
--Module Name
Find
--Users
--Content
----Image Galleries
----Job Postings
----Blog Posts
----Articles
--Help
--Modules
--Reports
--Themes
--Basically anything that you can find in Drupal
Username (with avatar) - clicking links to the dashboard
--Log out
--My profile
--My posts
--My notifications
--My groups
Hope that helps,
-Glenn
Another first impression
Overall
Based on the goals this is looking really good. Top-level items are reduced and are now clearly distinct.
I have some doubts about the second level, especially when it comes to displaying so many items. It risks recreating the overwhelm seen with the old main menu, and I think there are other options. Say I want to create a blog post. It's potentially simpler to make three small clear steps like so: Content (choose 1 of 6 items) > Add Content (1 of 2) > Choose type (1 of n) than to visually and conceptually negotiate steps two and three at once. Step three could instead appear as something like a modal dialog with large tiles showing the content types, now with the option of showing an icon and short description as well.
Labelling
I second Jen Lampton’s comment on Dharmesh's post: the 'Site' label is confusingly broad. However, her suggestion of 'Configuration' as a replacement doesn't quite work for me, since the item contains Reports too. 'Management' comes to mind, but isn't perfect.
RE: Shortcuts
I work with Drupal primarily as a designer and themer. I actually like the shortcut bar, and usually have the following items in it: Create Content, Find Content, Blocks, Views, Performance (for quickly clearing the cache/theme registry) and maybe one more. I also tend to work on more than one site at a time, and would not want to maintain a whole set of browser bookmarks for each site. That said, I would be happy if bookmarks/shortcuts were hidden by default (aside: bookmarks is a much better name).