Usability

This usability aims page was initially written as a subsection of a page in April, 2005. http://drupal.org/usability-aims

During the preparation for Drupalcon Boston, Neil, Dries, and I spoke with Jared Spool who challenged the Drupal project to establish two practices to improve our user experience. First, he recommended we need to establish our user experience goals, and second we need to watch our users use Drupal every six weeks.

Still not sure why usability testing is important? See what a linux hobbyist found in an informal usability test on Ubuntu.

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

[Continue reading on my blog at CivicActions: civicactions.com/blog/scaling_up_usability_testing_in_drupal]

First, for those that don't want to read the full post, here's the "30-second elevator speech":
This post to to discuss using Seleinum with Drupal. Specifically using Maven to run the selenium tests and writing the Selenium tests in Java.
The example code be downloaded from the Workhabit Inc. public repository here: https://svn.workhabit.com/svn/public/drupal/selenium/trunk
One must have the following installed to run:
1. Firefox
2. Java 1.5+
3. Maven
All 3 are easy to install and aquire. Once you download the code from the repository, you can just navigate to the directory and run:

There have been a few rounds of discussions on Drupal UX goals/principles this past year, so I thought this announcement would be of interest to the community:

"Late in 2007, our User Experience (UX) group—which does user interface design, visual design, user research, web development, and user interface writing—set out to articulate the principles that ought to guide Google designs worldwide. What are the fundamentals that all Google designers and researchers accept? Which approaches to design are particularly "Googley"? How can we encourage teams throughout Google to dream big and make smart design decisions?"

og_panels is here! And when I look at this http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo I gotta say, I get a little envious... With being quite some design people here in this group this page should rather look that good.

And it is not only about eye-candy: make the information better accessible by introducing more blocks. I volunteer to provide mockups and do the stuff. But I think we depend on Neill Drumm to get things rolling...

Ah, and that's not all. Look here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10445

Add Display Name field(s) to core in addition to Username is a D7 feature request. This document assists advocators to bring clarity and structure to the proposal and formulate design requirements to pass to core developers. So, add to this page.

Project information

Project: http://drupal.org/project/usability_suite
Status: Planning usability unit test creation and review interface

Description

Provide a method of measuring the user experience which has been stated as a very important goal of Drupal. In Dries' keynote he detailed the results of the usability testing and stressed that we should "Continue to make Drupal easier to use." This project will provide a suite of usability testing tools that will allow data to be recorded and analyzed in order to make improvements to Drupal's usability.

Additional Reading:

• GSoC Project Idea: Usability Test Suite
• Proposal

It doesn't seem to make sense to me that the collapsable areas on the modules page are open by default?

If you have lots of modules installed then you spend most of your time closing sections or just using the browsers find feature to find what you need.

On that same note it would be nice (don't know of it does this already) if you could organize modules in folders on your server and have them show up as a collapsable area. for example I could put all my SEO modules in a folder and have a SEO collapsable section.

just a thought.

Andy and Selena produced a video that does a really great comparison between Wordpress and Drupal.

They talk a lot about the usability pitfalls that Drupal runs into, and how Wordpress focuses on users while Drupal focuses on Developers, and what that means for the communities that the users are interacting with. There is a lot about Drupal from a usability perspective in this video, especially in the admin interfaces, and a bit about drupal.org.

All in all, they have a lot of pretty interesting observations.

The video is 18 minutes and starts off a bit slow, but it’s definitely worth checking out:

Hi all!
As a part of my course on Usability Design at the University of Leuven (Belgium), I'm doing a user and task analysis on Drupal.
I have started a user survey to collect useful data on the users of Drupal. With this data, I will create user profiles and personas to reflect some typical user groups of Drupal.

The survey can be found here: http://drupalsurvey.vanisterdael.be/index.php?sid=76524

Why are the "Administration Theme" settings are located in "Administer -> Site Configuration" area, rather than with all of the other theme settings in "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes".

The only unique configuration option that is in the "Administration Theme" menu is the "Use admin. theme for content editing" checkbox -- and this could simply be moved to the bottom of the list of themes in the "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes" menu. It seems unnecessary for this single option to have it's own section in the administration menu.

An update on usability testing at the University of Baltimore - I ended up putting together a very simple scenario involving page creation, navigation and permissions using the IRT node form - vertical tabs layout. I've tested this script in a session with our campus webmaster, and he was able to complete the tasks within the hour we had, but did have a couple problems. If you have any thoughts on the script, please post.

Better node admin content form module looks like a promising initiative to improve usability on the admin content page, despite the awkward name.

As does Form Table module which going by the description, appears to be implementing a project idea I had had for SoU:

Becca Scollan posted briefly here about a student project where they are considering doing some usability testing with Drupal at the University of Baltimore, which has the possibility to be expanded further in the summer. There are some preparation time constraints that at this point are leading her group to do consider completely replicating the scenario that was done at UMN, and it would be nice if some of the other admin test cases and tasks were fleshed out a bit more so that some new ground could be explored and to streamline the process a bit better.

There was talk at the UMN Usability session at Drupalcon that it would have been beneficial to set up the users with an initial "easy win" task that boosted their confidence -- like setting up an "About Us" page with a primary navigation link at the top. Webchick also pointed out that there were a number of task ideas that were discussed on this wiki page that were not executed, and that are still listed there with strikeout markup.

The intention of this wiki page is to flesh out some potential admin-related user scenarios that could be used now with this potential opportunity at the University of Baltimore. It could also serve as a general brainstorming place to flesh out other usability scenarios to be tested with other usability lab time as it becomes available.

Hi everyone,

Just reading through "Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries" and pulled this quote on current needs - -

"We want to see this happening more. The first goal is to measure the user experience, and not guess about it. One of the ways we can measure it is with usability testing, but we need labs and people to observe, facilitators to run the lab, and then interviewers to debrief the evaluators, and then resources to get everyone to the lab." (I think from Bevan Rudge)

Hi!

I make a module and implement hook_menu. Now I want to change the path for my module in navigation menu. I changed into code but it is to the old path. Can anybody help me to refresh the new path?
My old path is $items['admin/mybook'] and for new path I want $items['mybook']

Thank's for any help.

mihai

The finalized report documents just came in:

• Summary Report
• Issues Identification Matrix
• Issues Identification Matrix - Reordered

It might be obvious to some of you, but to me it certainly wasn't, so I thought a short link might be a good idea as most of you probably don't lurk around on Planet KDE or Planet Ubuntu. Do read usability professional Celeste Paul's refreshing realization:

• The #1 Problem in OSS Usability and What I'm Going to Do About It
• Short follow-up: Leadership is a problem but not the problem

First post here in this group, so a warm "Hi!" to everyone!

The background

Interesting application of vertical tabs.

Interesting idea of self-assessing a website for usability.

http://www.vkistudios.com/usability_assessment.cfm

I've long since been frustrated about the bad usability of the admin parts of Drupal. While incremental improvements are constantly made, it seems that a big overhaul is necessary in order to move forward. I find it very inspirational to see how Wordpress has hired HappyCog to work on an improved admin interface, based on interviews, research and usability testing. There are some obvious lessons that Drupal can learn from this as well, both from their methods as well as the results. There's a lot of momentum in the community right now to make similar efforts, and I'd be happy to apply as a student to work on this during the summer.

I propose a module that provides both an input filter and a widget used on the node edit form.

The filter would contain the path to an image file and the name or id of an imagecache preset.

The widget would allow the user to view images that exist on the site, and select which one should be inserted into the node body at a particular point, along with the preset that should apply to the display of this image. The widget would place the appropriate tag to be consumed by the filter when the node is rendered.

For anyone not on the Development list serve, there is a great discussion going on about module duplication, "scratch your itch" versus "control the chaos" approaches.

Less than 24 hours in, there are 30 posts. Really thoughtful stuff.

The first post is at: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-March/029249.html

In Dries' talk at DrupalCon Boston, he mentioned the need to remove code from core as well as add functionality. He specifically mentioned proposals to remove the throttle and ping modules from core.

Removing functionality is often an important thing to do regarding usability, and so I thought I'd raise this here.

I've just added an issue to the D7 queue a proposal to remove the "blog-it" functionality from aggregator.module. I've laid out all the arguments there. Please jump in and +1 it or argue otherwise.

With all the recent discussion about usability (also pushed on by the recent usabilty testing) I'd like to make a suggestion.

First, I'll outline two simple examples that I want to draw on (and don't run away at the offensive words!)

Microsft Word (and other word processors)

Ok, icon drawing time! Here's my suggestions for some specs and guidelines to get started with. All feedback welcome.

In the attachment:

• an icon template file for Inkscape
• basic directory structure for organising and categorisation of the icon sources and png renders.

The directories are mostly empty, but have a look in the applications and the mimetypes folder, there are SVG files for:

• forum icons
• calendar icons
• mimetype icons (with PSD sources for 16 and 32px versions which are actually further developed then the SVG!)

There's several simultaneous discussions going on about content types / node types - the terminology at that high level, and in terms of how we explain particular node types like "book page", "page" etc. and individual nodes/posts. So I'm starting this to try to draw some of them together.

Added to official ideas list at http://drupal.org/node/234746

GSoC Project idea: Suggested and discussed at UMN after Usability Testing as a way of Measuring the UX (user experience), and further discussed with Jimmy Berry, who is interested in taking this on as a student. Measuring the UX is the primary UX goal for Drupal.

This needs more work, but is a starting point for a project proposal.

Glossary:

• 'data' refers to user-input text and feedback, logs, video and audio

Reading the presentation Dries posted on his site (http://buytaert.net/files/usability-testing-minnesota.pdf) I saw a lot of my own thoughts regarding the usability obstacles in Drupal echoed. Thank you all involved for all the efforts that have gone into doing usability research on Drupal. I believe the results we're seeing are invaluable.

I'm posting this as my own reflections on what I've seen and reflected over so far. It's opinion and not statement of fact and I'd like to hear your opinion on the issues I discuss below.

Hi,

I came across this web site and thought i would pass this along. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ one article jumped out at me - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html shows eye tracking / heat map of users who were tasked with finding the population of a country -- and the 86% of users failed to find the information - i have not read the other articles but i will be reviewing them over the next couple of weeks to see if there is anything else that jumps out at me.

Smile
Sharon

I want to have a user Dashboard page, like in WordPress. After logged-in, user will see appropriate, stylish and easy-to-use links and panels. This should improve Drupal usability.

Drupal.org will see a huge overhaul one day - at least I hope so. Always having an eye for the competition may help. Interfacewise one can always look what Joomla does. http://extensions.joomla.org

I gotta say - it is so simple to present a lot of content in a still manageable way. Four Columns with Categories, two blocks with newest and most popular modules on top, and here you go. Could be a sample for other pages as well. I'm thinking of access control page and modules page in the drupal admin section.

I am looking of a way to increase stickness to my Drupal powered business index.
Light games seem like an interesting option.

Some ideas:
1. Random picture => identify the business.
2. Weekly Polls with Prizes.
3. Crossword / Puzzle module (e.g. like here).
4. Complete tasks to earn points.

Which modules do you recommend?
And do you have other game ideas which encourage stickness?

Thanks in advance,

Amnon

What brings me to this topic is all the excited talk I've been hearing second hand about splitting groups.drupal.org and drupal.org into many separate chunks (documentation.drupal.org, news.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, downloads.drupal.org, content.contributed.maintained.6.modules.downloads.drupal.org , you see where this is going). What worries me is that in such an implementation it may become too complex to get to key areas or discussions.

The way I see it, there are a couple major roadblocks for making such a system work (here comes the dreaded Robin-list, grab some coffee):

Continue reading and comment at my blog >

Hold on, hear me out :o) We're a really focused and strong (and almost too commercial) community, and we really have put our focus on features and output, and we've lacked a lot when it's come to making it all work correctly in every possible case.

That's where quality testing comes in. I've been thinking about Drupal's quality assurance process for a couple years now, but in the last few months it's really come to a head for me. My personal "dam-breaking" moment came when the Batch API in Drupal 6 prevented install, and other tasks depending on the API from running automatically, or in text based browsers, or in browsers were people have been privacy conscious and disabled JS and Meta refresh tags.

Without proper quality trails this will continue to happen. And here's another point I'd like to make:

Continue reading and comment at DrupalFiles >

I attached a real quick and dirty mock up of possible improvements to make to the new drag and drop system that was created for D6. Having already invested sometime into making a drag and drop interface for 5 (will be released shortly) I noticed a lot of features that I included in my module that I think would be great to have as part of the core drag and drop interface. Wish-list / some things I'll be trying to throw into a patch once I figure out the drag/drop architecture :) :

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This idea came out of a conversation Bevan and I were having at DrupalCon -- maybe it's crazy talk, but maybe it'll work.

Identify and isolate admin features; for example, creating forums, which currently requires a few steps, and knowledge of containers, etc. Analyze the workflow/mouse clicks required to build this functionality. Then, create a wireframe of the admin functionality that simplifies the task. Then, create a helper module that builds the streamlined, more intuitive UI

Moved to official ideas list at http://drupal.org/node/237899

Staring with some of the things here and some thinking and discussion here's a proposed proposal for a coding project:

Drupal's help system is fairly incomplete. At drupalcon there were many examples where the lack of a help system contributed to its usability woes. This project aims to enhance Drupal's help system through a pluggable, extensible help system API.

Somewhere in fall 2007 I started working on Vocabulary Index. The 1.0 version has been available for some weeks now and I have already started working on 2.0 (although a final won't be released for a few months. It's mostly brainstorming at this time).

Contract job to apply an new, finished design (eg, Photoshop files, style specs) to a Drupal 5 theme for a new skin for the rSmart website:
http://www.rsmart.com/

We will supply complete Photoshop files and style specs of finished site design developed modularly with Drupal in mind, as well as Drupal 5 instance already configured with modules/content/navigation.

Emphasis on phptemplate/CSS solutions, Drupal without hacks, usability, standards compliance, eventual Drupal 6 migration.

Scheduled delivery before 4/1/2008. Portland, OR area preference, but not required.

Bob Goodman presented http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/burn-help-manual-strategy-self-explaining-ux-design at DrupalCon Boston.

Post any thoughts or ideas you have here.

CODY HANSON: A lot to cover -- posting a lot of raw data on http://groups.drupal.org/usability -- How this got started -- He was putting together academic sites to find materials. Went to Barcelona, and noticed that Dries had prioritized usability. After 4th time hearing usability, he realized that they have a state of the art usability lab at the University of Minnesota. Approached Dries, and it got started from there. Excited about the network effect of this usability work.

The topic says it all - I want us to consider if we might be ready to implement the Human Interface Guidelines into Drupal themes. First and foremost within Drupal core themes and modules.

These guidelines might include:

• Standardized input/output messages
• Layouts of menus
• Menu structures
• help and manuals
• Page layouts
• Semantics
• ....you name'em grandma!

Drupalcon Boston 2008 presentation slides: Google Docs slideshow

First we designed tasks and scenarios to test.

Deliverables, which uncover UI problems, from the test include:

• We are working on a full itemized list of issues.
• Eye-tracking footage

Changes to implement and long-term goals:

• Issues to work on
• User experience goals (draft)
• Drupal.org "UMN Usability" issue tracker

Eye-tracking capture.

This is video from one of our evaluators' attempt at the first task in our usability test. For details of the task, see here.

These are the tasks we set forth for evaluators in the usability testing round at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Scenario

You are the webmaster for Wilson Library, and you have chosen a new content management system to manage part of the library’s online services.

You have been asked to configure the system so that your librarians can log in to create web pages for workshops they teach at the library.

The presentation was an amazing success. Big whoo-up for everybody involved in Usability, people oviously hunger for it. Video is to be found here: http://lvb.net/item/6026
The files are to be found here: http://netzschwimmer.de/dateien/drupal/fosdem/Use-A-Bility.pdf
Some Images are not GPL'd, but if there is no legal action, I'll leave it like that for the moment, it does not have to be there long anyway.

I had typed a long and worked out text here, till my browser crashed several times and all was dumped :( Don't have the nerve to redo it now. But it saved you some time reading :)

This document is the result of a discussion after Day 2 of the formal usability testing at UMN on 27 Feb 2008 about general high level usability goals and based partially on the usability tests. The "8 Golden Rules" and " Apple Human Interface Guidelines" were referenced and used to help guide discussion.

We selected 5 of of these as 'important' and worthy of publishing and promoting as usability goals for Drupal, at the same level as drupal's mission and principle. This needs to be fleshed out with descriptions / paragraphs.

User Experience Goals

Measure User Experience. Research on users’ experiences and interactions is the best way to identify usability issues. Although research will not directly generate solutions, it finds problems and measures success.

5 human factors central to evaluating the user experience are:

• Time to learn: How long does it take for typical users to learn relevant task?
• Speed of performance: How long does it take to perform relevant benchmarks?
• Rate of errors by users: How many and what kinds of errors are made during benchmark tasks?
• Retention over time: Frequency of use and ease of learning help make for better user retention
• Subjective satisfaction: Allow for user feedback

Consistency. Be consistent among Drupal user interfaces and with website user interface conventions. The results of actions should be predictable and expected. Drupal provides reusable patterns for many user interface elements.

Understandable Language. Use language that is understandable by users. Terminology should be unambiguous and useful. Help should be useful and readily accessible.

Not Feel Overwhelming. User interfaces should be straightforward and concise. Make complex tasks easy and hide, or omit, useless or irrelevant user interface elements.

Informative Feedback. Give useful and helpful messages and details about actions to reassure, give confidence, and guide to related tasks.