UX

I run a group of tech entrepreneurs called Ultra Light Startups (http://ultralightstartups.com/) and I'm interested in the use of Drupal in startups for several reasons. Many of our members' startups are either already built on Drupal or they are evaluating use of Drupal for a project. Several of our members are also active in the NYC Drupal community. Also, after hosting an event on Open Source CMS's last fall, I became convinced that Drupal was the right platform for several of my own projects, including a planned major upgrade to the Ultra Light Startups site.

You may have heard the excellent and very exciting news that following on from our work on Drupal.org, Mark Boulton Design has been contracted to take a look at the User Experience for the upcoming Drupal 7, and I'm very happy to be working with him on this project as well.

You might remember we mentioned that we were going to kick off an activity we call 'Pimp Your Admin' at the recent Drupalcon conference - we have a few interesting screencasts already and now we'd like to invite you to join in!

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can bend it to your will - get it to do just about anything you need it to do. Same goes for it’s administration interface (admin).

Experience Strategy:

• Make easy things easy and hard things do-able.
• Design for the 80% (ref: Pareto Principle)
• Privilege the End User

Our Goals:

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If you were at the recent Drupalcon in DC you may have seen Mark Boulton and I at the UX Table plying people with jellybeans and requesting offerings to our Drupal7 UX Suggestion Box. This is just one of the ways that we are hoping to engage the Drupal community in this project and to continue that process, you'll find below the contents of the suggestion box (as of late Friday, unfortunately our desk and all it's contents was trashed on Friday evening (boo!) so it's possible we've missed a few suggestions).

Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities. We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications.
http://fluidproject.org/

Fluid plans to build its site and UX component/design pattern library in Drupal, and thus might be a valuable collaboration group for folks focused on Drupal UX.

Fluid is funded by the Mellon Foundation.