d8ux

Bojhan and Dharmesh recently conducted a 6-participant moderated usability study on the new toolbar. The design was tested on desktop and mobile (and on the iPad in some cases).

Summary of findings
Overall, the toolbar prototype tested well on desktop and iPhones.

“This is a big improvement from where we are at [right now]” (P4)

Most of the participants (4 out of 6) had positive reaction. The rest of the participants (2) had a neutral response to the change. The mobile version was significantly better received than the desktop experience.

The short story

Come and help us perfect and implement the hot new mobile interface design in Drupal 8. Try the prototype on your phone. Also, go to the issue queue.

The long story

Over the past six months we've been working on designing the experience of getting to where you want within Drupal's admin interface.

One of the most important aspects of a major design process such as the UX for the D8 Layout Manager is to clearly define terms in a way that we all understand and agree upon. In particular, the word ‘context’ is subject to various interpretations as we learned at Drupalcon Denver. To that end, User Advocate, Bojhan and EclipseGC have been discussing some of the key terms in order to arrive at useful definitions. Below are the results of our discussions.

Hello All,

I plan to conduct a usability study with new users to understand how they get oriented and use Drupal for the very first time. I know some of you had concerns about usability testing being favored toward the new users and not the existing ones. We have studies in mind for them as well :) It is just a matter of time and project management.

Here is a rough rough draft of the study. I would be very much interested in your feedback. Based of the feedback, I will go ahead and create a more robust screener and moderator's guide.

Hello All,

Over the last few weeks, we have come up with a list of important tasks that we deemed important for the module redesign. However, we would like to test those with our users. So, we are going to conduct interviews and understand how they use the module page.
Following is the guide we intend to use to do the interviews:

Research module page

Goals

The first problem we need to solve is how users get around Drupal's interface on devices with small screens and touch screens. See the D8MUX road map.

Let's do some brainstorming and prototyping over how we get this good on mobile.

What do we need?

• Simple
• Consistent
• Finger friendly
• Complementary - The navigation can't upstage the main purpose of the page or task.

Current pain points

One page many purposes

In order to be more efficient in our approach in identifying issues, we have created a simple google spreadsheet. The intent is for everyone in the community to be able to log issues easily. Over the period of time we will be able to prioritize and solve these usability issues.

I hear you guys, this is a very 1.0 way of doing it, but at least it is a start! right?

So when you get annoyed with something, make a difference, log the issue.

Here is the google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/a/acquia.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai6zQDgsPhvldH...

DrupalCon is approaching! Excited?

I am thinking of leveraging this opportunity and get some data. We could of course do usability testing! But instead I think, I would be better to do user research because:
- Usability Testing can be done remotely
- We are getting usability testing data (slowly but, yes!)
- We don't have any user research data
- User research data will greatly help the design process + plus many other obvious advantages

RESEARCH AT DCL:
What I plan to do research on?

I'm looking at putting together an initiative that will look into the user experience of administrating a Drupal site through a non-desktop PC.

Road Map

1. Redesigning the navigation of the admin interface on small and touch screens.
2. Heavily modifying the 'Seven' Theme to become more responsive and mobile friendly

"Mobile User" Experience

The emphasis is not on the device, but on the context of the person using it. I would almost call it 'device agnostic'. What is important is that the user is not sitting at as desk facing a big screen. They could be on the bus, sitting in a cafe or walking back from work.