Summary of Drupal.org interviews

We are beginning the process of re-designing Drupal.org. As part of that process, I conducted 10 interviews over email and IRC to help build a survey that will be posted on the Drupal.org homepage. Here is a summary of the Drupal.org interview responses that will be worked into a survey.

Question 1. Describe yourself as a Drupal.org user?

-Experienced, Fanatic, daily user, web site developer, contributor, help with support, help with documentation, heavy user, learning developer, long way from an expert, use it when I have a question, designer by choice but programmer by neccesity, user supporter.

Question 2. How often do you visit Drupal.org?

-Once a day, Several(multiple) times a day, every day, frequently throughout the day, have it open in a window all the time, more frequent if I have an issue, off and on all day long, "mutliple times per day, even on weekends", once a day, twice a day

Question 3. When you visit Drupal.org, how long do you spend on the site?

-30 seconds to check an issue, "Up to an hour or more if I'm helping in the forum, browsing modules or the handbook, etc.", 30 to 90 minutes, bopping back and forth all the time, 2 minutes or less to track issues, up to an hour in helper mode, 20-40 minutes at a time, just a few minutes normally, 10-15 minutes if I am looking for a solution, 10-15 minutes, revisit several times a day, an hour probably, "5 minutes max, usually less", "since I am not a module contributor yet, 1-3 minutes"

Question 4. What would you describe as your goals for visiting Drupal.org ?

-Follow up on previous contributions to forums or issues
-Site development tool
-Get positive feedback from a contribution to the forums
-Check new module updates
-Check API to solve module updates
-"Keep finger on the pulse of questions"
-Social activity
-Help in forums
-Get questions answered
-Maintenance such as spam or cleaning up comments
-Lend a hand to those who are repeating my mistakes
-Mainly to keep abreast of my issues
-Interact with the community on bug fixes and features.
-figure out how to do a task I might not know how to do
-find some type of module to do what I need
-queue up RSS feeds in my reader for anything I find useful
-look up information, download modules, read issues, and help in the forums.
-I guess my goal is to satisfy my customers need, be able to help my customers understand what they're getting. (and thus my own company's)
-want to see drupal become really big, so a goal would be to help facilitate that at some point one way or another
-Only to search for answers and check on any issues I have posted.
-I used to help in the forums but I've stopped that recently, because I have my own project I'm working on. Less time for others. But I do help in drupal-support only because it's quick. Instant gratification..
-Primarily to see if my issue queries or bug reports have been answered.
-Flip through the paying work forum.
-Stopped going to documentation because of confusion'

Question 5. What is easy to do on Drupal.org?

-Creating content, posting comments.
-front page news is easy
-with some practise forums are easy to navigate
-See if anyone's responded to anything I've posted in. Tracker rules!
-check issues queues (if they aren't too big)
-track issues in my tracker list
-spend lots of time answering newbie questions
-use the API ++easy
-find core download
-find modules you know the names of
-contact a user
-Easy to see announcements of major happenings in the community,
-easy to access personally relevant info (my tracker, my issues...),
-easy to see links that are valuable to contributors.
-find out whats new with drupal and find modules
-tracking your stuff too, like post, etc.
-i think it's easy to find the actual drupal project and download it.
-keep up on drupal-related news on the frontpage is easy.
-search through the modules (it's hard too, but that's because of the sheer number) but it's well organized, so pretty easy over all
-Searching with google. ;)
-tracking issues is done very well.
-Just submitting an issue, it's easy to track and there's a set procedure that's in place.

Question 6. What is hard to do on Drupal.org?

-Site speed has been a real problem recently.
-I often find it very difficult to find an old issue node that i recall reading
-Finding the good modules
-Helping maintain the handbook is really problematic-
-navigating the handbooks the top one.
-a link to /project/modules/date could be useful (for seeing updated modules)
-Finding things, especially handbook pages.
-find handbook pages
-that answer specific questions
-find forum threads (I always just use the block nav)
-find new modules
-find modules that match a known feature set (but you don't know anything about the modules)
-Searching. Finding the information you need quickly. Navigating the site.
-search for something, for instance I really wish search had a by date field, where I could say, only show me nodes posted with the past 3 months
-How to decide on a new module if it's something I would need or if there is something that is better out there.
-i think the hardest thing is knowing where to go as a new user.
-often not very handy things come up first in search, like unanswered posts etc, when there's a handbook page that answers the question in detail.
-I find a lot of the rest of the site kind of obtuse, I have to say I especially hate threaded forums
-You've heard it before. the handbooks..

Question 7. Is there anything else important about Drupal.org that we haven't discussed?

-sometimes the hardcore regular user/developers can be a bit harsh on new people making suggestions. those answers can be a bit demoralizing.
-What has hugely improved my understanding of Drupal by 1000% has been the articles on IBM, and drupaldojo. some structured tutorials like these have helped me 100 times more than the handbooks ever have.
-I know Dries has shot down the idea, but having bookmarking would be really nice.
-there are frequent lags in server response, where you can tell that you're waiting in the apache queue for an open process so it can take 30 sec to load my issues sometimes.
-Integrate groups:how about by linking taxomies to groups
-maybe a block that is sensitive to what the page is about and suggestts groups that a re related
-But Google is faster.Google is also better at string searches
-it would be nice if there was a new modules section, there have been a lot of cool new modules lately that I will hear about through the lullabot podcast or from groups.drupal.org but don't really find anything on the site about it
-a rating of modules would be nice too
-I think would be nice too would be able to track my recent post with maybe an RSS feed
-I do think handbooks could use some attention. there's just a lot of old, old information mixed with new stuff, confusing.
-as a drupal based company (not completely, but heavily) it'd be really nice to have a bit more robust of an area to promote ourselves, and by proxie, drupal. I don't know if that should be a separate site, but I think it could definitely help you all. Perhaps some sort of rating system from other members of the community if they've used them (sort of like ebay)
-there should be a way to upload images for handbook pages. Of course have guidelines for that too but it shouldn't take a genius to upload images to illustrate concepts.
-drupal search is an abomination. :D I would actually prefer the search box routed us to google - teh d.org search takes far too long to return anything.