I conducted this interview in #drupal-support on Saturday night at SuperHappy Dev house. The interview focused on identifying the user, and their usage of Drupal.org. We then discussed overall goals of the user, and individual tasks they conducted on the web site. Finally, we focused on qualifying the tasks on Drupal.org by ease of use, and difficultly. We finally finish with the identification of important task we might have overlooked in our structured questions.
We need more volunteers to conduct up to 10 interviews to prepare the survey.
amazon> Hello, any Drupal.org users here who are interested in doing an interview for the Drupal.org redesign?
[22:15] amazon: there's a drupal.org redesign?
[22:15] Yes
[22:15] and we are talking to users first
[22:15] you mean garland?
[22:15] No, I mean the website Drupal.org is going to be re-designed
[22:15] ah!
[22:16] so you're looking for input on possibilities, not a review of existing design.
[22:16] right, more to learn about the users
[22:16] who use Drupal.org
[22:16] gotcha. Okay, hit me.
[22:16] and to understand your needs, etc.
[22:16] Ok, great
[22:16] Question 1. How would you describe yourself as a Drupal.org user?
[22:17] a designer by choice, and occaisionally a programmer by necessity.
[22:17] How often do you use Drupal.org?
[22:17] That's question 2
[22:18] I check it about twice daily, to see if people have commented on existing threads. (my d.org bookmark is to 'track own posts' page).
[22:18] I'll skim recent topics in the new topics list now and then to see if there's something simple I can help people with.
[22:19] Question 3. How long do you spend on Drupal.org when you visit it?
[22:19] not very long - since I'm not yet a module contributor, it's normally about one to three minutes.
[22:19] does that include visiting the forums?
[22:19] I find the handbook less helpful than the irc channels, so I'll often come here first.
[22:19] pretty much, yeah.
[22:20] That's good to here
[22:20] hear
[22:20] Question 4. You started talking about why you visit Drupal.org, could you talk a little more about your goals when visiting Drupal.org?
[22:21] Primarily to see if my issue queries or bug reports have been answered.
[22:21] Also to flip through the paying work forum.
[22:22] Okay, that's good feedback.
[22:22] anything else?
[22:23] You indicated that you visited the Drupal.org documentation, what were you trying to accomplish by visiting the documentation, and why did you stop going there?
[22:23] Question 5:
[22:23] confusion.
[22:23] Do you remember any examples of what you were looking for?
[22:23] There's very little hierarchy to much of the documentation, and there's a lot of duplication of information in there.
[22:23] Ok, great
[22:24] Hum, I'm trying to think of a specific example, but let's say php snippets.
[22:24] So you found the snippets, but it was too confusing in organization?
[22:24] There's about fifteen different snippet pages, php snippets, php block snippets, phptemplate snippets... etc.
[22:24] <--| fp has left #drupal-support
[22:24] Ok, got it
[22:24] and then subdivided unneccessarily into 4.7 and 5, which implies that all the 4.7 snippets just suddenly decided to stop working.
[22:24] =-= dvessel[afk\ is now known as dvessel
[22:25] (though I believe many of them still do)
[22:25] Ok, that's a good observation.
[22:25] I am trying to find out what works really well on Drupal.org. What would you consider easy to do on Drupal.org?
[22:25] Question 6:
[22:26] amazon: Is there a forum post on this? It's odd your asking these questions in here.
[22:26] ah, but where else would he meet illustrious personalities like ours? :D
[22:26] dvessel: well I could jump to another channel if you want?
[22:26] I have to come to the users,
[22:27] drupal.org has plenty of users. :)
[22:27] amazon: I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for with that last question - do you mean what do I think is succesful about d.org?
[22:27] Not successful. But what can you do with ease, great confidence, what can you do quickly.
[22:27] Do you want some examples?
[22:27] oh, anything to do with teh forums.
[22:27] Is easy?
[22:28] As for cvs and modules, that's much more complex for me.
[22:29] <Squidster|actual> hey.
[22:29] Hi
[22:29] <Squidster|actual> okay, so, forums easy, cvs confusing.
[22:29] <Squidster|actual> I don't do patches at this point, so I can't comment on the ease of the admin of those.
[22:29] Question 7: You started talking about what's hard, like CVS. Could you give some examples of things that take too long, things you've tried to do on Drupal.org, but didn't succeed?
[22:29] <Squidster|actual> drupal search is an abomination. :D
[22:30] <Squidster|actual> I would actually prefer the search box routed us to google - teh d.org search takes far too long to return anything.
[22:30] That's great feedback.
[22:30] <Squidster|actual> It's also too likely to return a random comment or complaint rather than an actual module - for example, searching for flexinode returns a thousand bug reports before you get to the module.
[22:31] <Squidster|actual> I had to be told by sepeck that there even was an advanced search pulldown menu.
[22:31] That's good to hear. It will help a lot.
[22:31] <Squidster|actual> er, thanks.
[22:31] Question 8: Was there anything important about Drupal.org that we haven't talked about yet.
[22:32] <Squidster|actual> this is a bit of madness of my own, but I would love to see certain keywords on search return specific 'sponsored-ish' results.
[22:32] <Squidster|actual> i.e any search with the keyword CCK would first return the cck module handbook as a sticky.
[22:32] <Squidster|actual> though that would be a nightmare to maintain, no doubt.
[22:33] It's a good suggestion, I am sure many people feel the same.
[22:33] <Squidster|actual> I was speaking to unconeD the other day about upcoming things, and he also mentioned you guys were going to be looking at more avatars and images?
[22:35] unconed is sitting beside me here, outside San Francisco
[22:35] <Squidster|actual> hah!
[22:35] <Squidster|actual> Tell him squidster says hi.
[22:35] <Squidster|actual> (the guy who keeps ripping off his logo for paintings)
[22:36] Anything else important
[22:37] <Squidster|actual> not too much - though if the association votes in favour on it, I look forward to building stuff for you guys. :D
[22:38] That's great
[22:39] I appreciate you doing this interview
[22:39] <Squidster|actual> np - if you need anything, let me know.
[22:40] <Squidster|actual> btw, if unconed ever wants to drop by the dojo and give a brief talk on his design philosophy behind d.org and so on, it'd be muchly appreciatd.
[22:40] I'll ask him