Season of Usability

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
This group should probably have more organizers. See documentation on this recommendation.

The Season of Usability is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software.

Usability Mentors
Becca Scollan
Roy Scholton
Student
Bojhan Somers

Input and additional mentorship is valuable and appreciated. Please subscribe to this group if you wish to contribute to the direction of this project.

Bevan's picture

Vertical Tabs In Drupal 7 Core! How Open Source Does Usability – The Process

Vertical tabs are finally in Drupal core!

Only local images are allowed.
Screenshot of vertical tabs on an 'Article Edit' page in Drupal 7.

A week ago Angie "webchick" Byron committed a large patch from #323112 Vertical Tabs to Drupal 7 core. This change is quite possibly the most significant usability enhancement to Drupal 7 to date. Two of the three formal usability tests did usability testing with vertical tabs and reported positively.

Only local images are allowed.
Screenshot of a 'Story Edit' page in Drupal 6, before vertical tabs.

UPDATE: Rob Loach has created a patch to implement vertical tabs on the node-type form.

UPDATE: See other issues about vertical tabs in Drupal core .

What is more interesting about this however, is the process, time and effort that it took to get this change into Drupal core. It all started over a year ago, well before DrupalCon Boston 2008 even before Drupal 6 had a stable release. The discussion around part of that patch goes back as far as November 2007! Along the way countless people have been involved in many discussions, worked on heaps of mockups, lots of prototypes, and loads of code.

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Bevan's picture

Status Update

With DrupalCon, moving house, and some other factors I have been struggling financially recently and have needed to focus on billable work in order to make ends meet. An influx of urgent client work also contributed to this. Such I haven't found or made time in the last couple of weeks to continue node-form development. This is a status update so that interested parties can keep up with the status of the Season of Usability project.

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Update: Prototype on node forms

On Monday I started researching recent efforts to date on node forms. There has been a lot of activity in this area recently and things have really taken off this week -- largely pushed by newcomer to the usability group: SteveJB.

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Goal decided: Node add edit forms

I've been mulling on the ideas for project goals over the weekend and have decided that my goal for the project is:

Improve the usability of node add and edit forms in drupal 7

This is something Chx placed emphasis on in our initial discussion, and Nick Lewis gave 5 very convincing arguments for. Thanks to everyone for your great feedback. I really appreciate it.

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Bevan's picture

Project announcement by OpenUsability

Ellen at OpenUsability has announced this SoU project, and I blogged her announcement and some personal notes on CivicAction's blog.

Bevan/

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What are the goals for the project?

What are the goals for the project?

Now that the project is ready to go, we need to establish the goals for the project. I have several general ideas. Please suggest more.

  1. General Improvements for Drupal Core (based on results of UMN usability lab testing)
  2. Node-add/edit Forms
  3. Usability Guide/Handbook for Drupal Developers
  4. UI Patterns for Drupal
  5. Managing Many Items With Tables, with;
    • links to items and related objects
    • data display columns
    • operations individual items
    • operations on multiple items
    • filters
    • table headers
    • sorts
    • pagination
  6. Fix 'local tasks' (Tabs) (Split into, local actions/operations, local navigation)
  7. General Improvements for Selected Contrib Modules; Panels, CCK, Views, Imagecache?
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Chx to Mentor Drupal in Season of Usability

Only local images are allowed.I'm really happy to announce that Károly Négyesi (aka chx) has offered to be my technical mentor in my Season of Usability project on Drupal.  Further Károly also promised to implement the results of the project;  "I am making this program better and bigger by promising that I will code whatever you come up with".

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Bevan's picture

To Core Developers; I Need You, Please. :)

Only local images are allowed.I still haven't been able to establish a technical mentor for my SoU project. I need a Drupal developer with a fair amount of Drupal karma and a small interest in usability, for this project to be successful. I'll be plain; I'm directly asking Dries, core developers, and other similarly-respected folk in the Drupal community, for someone who can commit about 3 hours per week for three months.

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Drupal Developer as Mentor Needed for Season of Usability Programme

Only local images are allowed.I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal.

As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.

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Usability guide for drupal developers

UI-Patterns.com is a great resource for information architects, UX designers, UI specialists, but most of all, for developers!

How can something like this be made more useful and usable by developers of both drupal core and contrib? I would like to see usability start at drupal's roots, rather than being left for an after-thought. (This too-often results in interfaces that are harder to fix than they would have been to get right the first time).

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