Usability

As most of you are aware that we completed a successful round of usability testing with 8 participants new to Drupal at the University of Minnesota in May 2011. Yayy! Thank YOU everyone involved in making this work. I was pleased to see the attention this study is getting on the issue queue (tagged with “UMN 2011”) and at various conferences including DCL. But this is just uncovering the tip of the iceberg, a lot more needs to be tested and be reported to the community. As a part of this, I plan to explore various avenues to conduct more studies.

Anyone spotted the demo for the Twenty Eleven theme for Wordpress 3.2 - http://twentyelevendemo.wordpress.com

I think its worth us tearing this apart and looking at the ideas they have bought in, I've only played with it briefly and its pretty nice actually. That said my initial impression was not so favorable (omg this is lame), however the more I play around with and uncover its various features the more I like it.

Principles are important. They ensure consistent and fair decision making and they set objectives for us all to work towards. Most of all, they keep us honest.

We've been looking at establishing a set of principles that encapsulate our intentions in this initiative and give designers a strong story of Drupal. It would be great to get some feedback on the principles we have been working on.

The Design Initiative has three main goals - build a new core theme, build a new collaboration site for designers, and community outreach. The new core theme initiative is well under way and we're tantalizingly close to design.drupal.org becoming a reality. What we need to do now is step up a gear and start thinking about outreach.

A big part of any user experience is usability. It's the first step toward an engaging and seamless experience.

There are three key areas that will be the focus of the formal mobile usability tests:

1. Navigation
2. Readability
3. User Input

Currently Drupal's admin interface fails one and two almost instantly on small and touch screens. All three need a wide range of tests before we can confidently address these issues. I'd like it if people could weigh in based on previous experience.

I'll be posting more about the usability tests soon.

We need to start thinking and talking about what approaches we're going to take in Drupal 8 with regards to design for mobile.

My own opinion is that we should probably be looking really closely at responsive design and how we might apply or adapt the patterns emerging in that field. The idea of "one web" and a unified design and user experience independent of device appeals to me. I don't want an impoverished mobile experience, so please don't assume what I want to see or do just because I'm on a tablet or handset.