Usability

Focus of the study

To understand the following:

• Current Pain Points with Drupal
• Feedback on Spark
• End to end process of content creation process
• Applications used in conjunction with Drupal

Participant profile

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One of the key things I wanted to do in the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative after the December 1st feature freeze hits is to go and do lots of user testing of the functionalities we built and adapt the user interfaces and flows to make it easier to build multilingual sites (and then test it again). Not many people believed this would actually happen (when you say in an issue you'll follow up with more user testing, and so on, it can be seen as just a way out to move on). However I've got outstanding help from Bojhan Somers, Dharmesh Mistry and Lisa Rex on best practices for user testing. I not only got help on the tools to use, but also building out a concrete test plan with Dharmesh and Bojhan actively involved. To say the test was well prepared is an understatement.

With bojhan, dcmistry, lisarex, kolearyUX, webchick and yoroy.

Topics

1. UX task list: where/how
2. Field UI revamp in core: possible past feature-freeze?

Maintaining an actionable task list for ux team

We discussed opening an 'uxteam' project on d.o/project/uxteam and use its issue queue to maintain a list of actionable tasks that aren't necessarily directly mappable to a core component or contrib project yet.

There's a Google spreadsheet where we tried to maintain a list of UX design tasks that are actionable, but not fit for a issue:

Modal dialogs are making their way into core and this could have a great impact on UX strategy for all of Drupal. In general modals are useful for allowing a user who is engaged in a primary task objective to temporarily carry out a ‘secondary’ task in an additional ‘window’.

The SiteBuilding Usability Initiative video released last month illustrates the general concept.

On Nov 1 2012, we tested the Views UI (7.x-3.5) with intermediate-level Drupal users at the BADCamp UX/UI Summit to provide the community with a clear picture of the usability bottlenecks in the Views UI

Check out Report from BADCamp 2012 Views Usability Testing for the full report. Help improve things in these issues

(disabling comments here, if you have feedback, please add it to the full report linked above, thanks)

The D7 IA has evolved to be very wide and flat because the toolbar has a flat menu structure that requires a page load to drill down. As we re-structure the interaction pattern of menus we have an opportunity to reassess the IA. Wide top level menus with a large number of children made sense when every level down required a new page load. The new menu allows for deep exploration without the need for multiple page loads so we can build narrower and deeper and employ more hierarchies and sub-categorization that will inform the user. To illustrate this point I’ve created the following example:

Quite a few people have asked for all the designs that Spark is working on to be accessible from one place so that they don't have to sift through all of the issues to find them. Below are links to all of the invision prototypes that are available right now as well as a few html prototypes and live demo sites. I have included the related issue numbers so you can make comments in the appropriate issue.

As you may or may not know Blocks and layouts is a design problem that I have been working on for the better part of three years since I first started working at Acquia. Back then Jeff Noyes, Dries and myself were just focused on introducing drag-drop blocks to Drupal Gardens and didn't have a view to the wider problem of layouts because really at that point seven was not even out and it just seemed too big a problem to solve.