UX-Team
Improving usability is a top priority for Drupal 7. We are all discussing and working on that in the usability group. That's over there.
Over here, a smaller team of experts would like to document the bigger picture with:
- Updates on UX work in progess, in context.
- Guidelines that will help us improve the Drupal user experience as a whole.
- Working group for Usability testing projects.
No discussion here, sorry. Please, join the efforts in the usability group, we are looking forward to working with you there!
A critical look at the implementation of Plugin Manager - Underlying issues and possible solutions
I have been harboring some growing concerns about the direction of the plugin manager integration proposals for Drupal core almost since their inception, but have not been able to make an informed opinion on the subject until I had properly reviewed the proposed system on a much deeper scale.
While my impressions of the project and the current implementation are fairly negative, I have aimed to frame my criticisms in a positive constructive manner because I believe that the goals of the project are worthwhile, and that for a large section of users this could be a very flexible and usable solution.
Unfortunately a lot of my concerns have been well founded, and I believe that the implementation of this system needs to be taken in a different direction for it to be able to succeed in its goals, while not negatively affecting projects like Aegir, Open Atrium and many other ‘serious developers’.
Drupal core patches and Vertical tabs
There are many Drupal 7 core issues that are tagged as "Needs usability review". It would be awesome to try and keep an eye on this list and review UI changes that are going in to core/7, with the aim of trying not to degrade Drupal usability further with un-monitored changes, as we usually do in Drupal core. The most important ones to review are the ones that are in the review process, marked RTBC or recently committed.
Drupal7 UX Project is Go! - Now's the time to get involved
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.
How do you convince a Drupal company to invest in Drupal's usability?
I would love to be contributing a lot more to the Drupal Usability community, especially in the implementation of prototypes, and solutions to usability issues. However I'm pretty limited by the need to make a living.
Several people here in the community work heavily on Drupal Usability, and appear to do so under company time. How did you convince your employers to invest in Drupal Usability?
