Topic
General Usability Issues and the admin section in special
Course of the talk
Most people agreed, that the user interface in drupal is not very good. We did not discuss much what improve it, but rather thinking about how in terms of organiztion it could be done. We concentrated on mending the admin Interface.
Luckily Neill Drumm was present, who is the current Maintainer of Drupal 5 Core. He gave us the core developers Perspective and gave recommendations on how to do it best and how to communicate with Developers.
So we agreed on some points:
There should be a three-step approach:
- Analysis and Documentation of the present state
- I forgot this
- Giving recommendations, doing mockups of a better interface
Generally, we are not thinking on superimposing ONE Admin theme (even if it would not be bad), but rather developing one and seeing if it gets popular.
Furthermore, in the end there should be Design recommendations to Module Developers, how the interface should look like. Those Guidelines exist e.G. in Gnome and many other Operating system/Application/Framework.
So Jan Krummrey and Thomas Moseler started it - now they have to keep it going.
We all subscribed to this group and are surely intending to find out what the status is here, because I read most of what we talked about has been said before. So we should start to cooperate with the people already active in this group.
Speaking of usability...
I was looking for a reply link at the bottom of this page. There is none. Why? Because this is a wiki page. groups.drupal.org has "Story" and "Wiki page" content types, and the only visible difference is either a reply link at the bottom or an Edit tab at the top of the page. Sucks, doesn't it? I see room for improvement here.
Gaele
Might be on Purpose
Well I think the difference is the freetagging possibility and the use of the wiki formattting syntax. I think generically a wiki does not have the content type "reply". So for answering, just let's edit this post.
Thomas
Comments and Design Patterns
I think it was
- document current practices,
- analyze and find problems with current UI, why it is important for users, giving reference sources (nielsen, other projects, etc) and
- recommendations + mockups = design patterns.
On 1) I suggest this UI group add comments "in favor" or "against" the current practice, to arrive to consensus and ideas for improvement.
On 2) I suggest much help should come from drupal business around, since they'll get most of the benefits of this UI (well.. their clients will :) The suggestion is that these companies contribute by sending samples screenshots of UI elements (admin or front-end) they develop/customize for client websites (they can send it anonymously as well).
On 3) I suggest this to be done in a very structured page, adding as much as examples as possibles. See Yahoo Design Patterns for a very good example of what I am proposing. Click on each category and see how they communicate the importance of each element.
cheers,
Giovani Spagnolo, WebYES! Internet Re-think, Telematics Freedom Foundation
Best practices
Getting usability feedback from businesses who sell Drupal services to end users is a really good idea. These people should know what issues are confusing to end users, what they keep having to explain, etc.. And I'm sure they'd like to see these issues fixed. They might also assist in gathering information directly from users.
But first we should gather some data on the current usability practices in Drupal (task #1 on the action plan). Did Neil (drumm) have any ideas for how this could be done? Is there anything already written somewhere, or is it all in the air?
When it comes to documenting the best practices, we should look at how other projects present their best practices and guidelines. The Yahoo! Patterns example looks great! Other examples are Apple's Human Interface Guidelines which is thorough and specific down to the smallest detail. Same goes for GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines. Even though these are huge guidelines for operating systems, we could learn from how they are written and structured. The use of graphics to explain how to do things (and how not to) is something we should keep in mind.
Eventually, the best practices/guidelines will go into the Handbooks. I've applied to be a member of the Documentation Team, and encourage you to do the same ;)
Ximo (Joakim)
Using Flickr for mockups
In Barcelona it was said that Flickr frowns upon putting mockups (instead of just photos) on their site. But the Yahoo Design Patterns site shows Yahoo themselves use Flickr for these purposes (Flickr is owned by Yahoo).
Gaele
Yeah
But I heard they don't actually delete screenshot images, they just ommit them in searches. It should be fine, the Usability page even tells us to "post and comment on images with Flickr tag drupalui."
Btw, would be nice if people wrote their name under their comments so we know who said what ;)
Ximo
PS.: why don't make this page a forum topic
So we can get email notifications as well ???
Right
Let's quit this wiki and move to forum pages. As I said above this combination of page and wiki content types in Drupal sucks.
- At the top is a message/manual telling you this is a wiki page, but it's easily overlooked.
- A manual? This page needs a manual?! ;-)
Gaele
Forum page
Well I haven't contributed much as of yet! But if we move it to a forum page, could you paste a link to it here as a forwarding address
Serge