The battle to "engage" site visitors is on. Gone is the day where a CMS just helps you create pages that you hope visitors read & consume. Today your site must provide extraordinary visitor experiences that cause them to take the action you want - from buying to reading to playing - and measure the effectiveness of the experience so you can improve it as needed.
Improving site engagement must be simple. Making it simple in Drupal requires a variety of Drupal component parts to be assembled - and a few gaps filled.
This is a Drupal Group devoted to assembling those components. Many of the relevant Drupal components have their own individual projects on drupal.org or groups here on g.d.o. But this group is an umbrella where we combine those activities with our own in one place to get a singular view of the problem, and the Drupal solution.
Concept model
We want to give you a quick run through our ideas and current state of research for the Blocks & Layout initiative. I am working together with Useradvocate and EclipseGc to form a broad understanding.
One of the first things I want to tackle is describing how we use "context", because this is one of the most common questions. A really quick way of describing it is that context(s) are the data objects that blocks depend upon, to determine when display (yes/no) and how to display.
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Revisionable Layouts
One of the requirements for the LSD initiative is that layouts themselves be editorial controlled. This means providing revisions to layouts with the ability to move the layout through an approval workflow.
I'm not proposing we put this functionality directly in core, but we provide a way for contrib to "easily" add the functionality.
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Information architecture redo
I want to get serious about redoing the information architecture of Drupal. To be frank, it's a problem. Users don't know what's structure and whats content. Neither do we. I see developers all the time asking where their modules belong.
Read moreContent Creation UX Study Plan
Introduction
Drupal 8 wants to provide a much-improved workflow for content creators. One of the most critical screens in this is the content creation page. This issue outlines a plan for implementing a new design for this page.
The main issues that this design wants to solve are:
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D8 UX Analysis – Layouts, IA Spaces and the Principle of Definition-Usage Pairs
One of the key ideas behind the new D8 architecture is that of resources being identified by unique URLs. It sounds simple enough but, behind it, I think there are some exciting potentials for transforming Drupal’s UX strategy. I want to share some ideas about that kind of transformation here and I’ll tackle it from a few angles: ‘what is a page’; the principle of definition-usage pairs; and IA Space and URL semantics.
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Web Experience Management session at Drupalcon Denver
Looks like the web experience management session at Drupalcon Denver has been approved.
What would people like to hear at this? I can give some or all of the session I did at BADcamp, but there's much more that can be covered, and I'd like to make sure we're getting relevant things discussed.
Thoughts?
Have you, as a Drupal developer (/Drupal shop) had customers ask for these features (WEM-type) in their Drupal site?
The New, Convoluted Life Cycle Of A Newspaper Story
http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/the-new-convoluted-life-cycle-of-a...
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blockquote> Always start in a blog form — i.e., your quickest way of publishing.
If the update is significant enough that, in print, it would merit its own new headline, then create a new blog post, rather than an update to an older post.
Found blog post - Radioactivity 2: basics
Radioactivity 2 allows you to track any fieldable entities; users, nodes, commerce products, etc. It can be used as a simple view counter but also as a popularity or activity meter, e.g. with it you can create a 'most viewed nodes at this moment' list. There is also limited rules which allows you to create an activity meter for basically whatever you want.
I imagine this is of interest here: http://mearra.com/blogs/teemu-merikoski/radioactivity-2-basics
UX-Team update: Thoughts on D8UX Strategy
Drupal 8 development has been underway for some time now and we're seeing increased activity around issues that aim to improve Drupal usability.
What's been missing is an overview of where we should focus our time and energy when tackling Drupal user experience challenges. This post provides an outline of the topics we want to focus on to make Drupal 8 great.
In a nutshell, we want to:
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Designing Drupal's Mobile Navigation
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
Read moreDrupal 8 Mobile UX Roadmap
As we found out in London, Drupal's mobile admin interface faces some big obstacles to overcome. If we want to to be able to tackle some of these problems in the next release cycle we need focus, the idea being we don't move on to the next item in till we have the previous one licked. I've whipped up proposal for our road map. This is by no means complete, there is plenty of detail to fill in.
I'm hoping we can work on it together.
Words to live by
Don't let the current interface hold us back
Read moreWeb Experience Management module / tech list
Relevant features, and modules, are as follows.
Read moreInteresting articles on the web describing / discussing Web Engagement Management
20 Oct 2011 - SDL's Robert Carroll Says Web CMS World is Exploding (CMSwire.com)
18 May 2010 - WEM: A Look at Multivariate and A/B Split Web Testing (CMSwire.com)
13 May 2010 - The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management (CMSwire.com)
General description of Web Engagement Management - Jay Batson's presentation at BADcamp 2011
Here's a copy of the deck Jay used at his BADcamp presentation on Web Engagement Management. It's a general overview of the driving factors, the features needed, the Drupal work underway, and a request for participation by community members.
In order to get this to upload, I had to split it into 2 halves - each under the 2MB limit.
Blueskying Drupal 8 Mobile Solutions
Building mobile solutions encompasses a large problem space: native apps, HTML5 web apps, responsive design, device capability detection, mobile/desktop switching, front-end performance, etc.
I'm seeing lots of really interesting contrib modules and themes tackling mobile problems in Drupal 7.
Since Dries has already indicated that mobile will be an important aspect of Drupal 8, my question is:
what do you think Drupal 8 core (not contrib) should provide for mobile solutions out of the box?
User persona for advanced content creator
Last updated by jasonsavino on Sun, 2012-04-08 22:56
As the Curriculum and training group has identified while outlining the various skill sets involved in site creation & use, there's an under-represented skillset in the site creation process: that of the "Advanced content creator". This person has unique requirements, and to describe the requirements, it's first helpful to describe the person / persona. I hope this will be useful not only to the Curriculum & training group, but to other Drupal initiatives related to the Drupal needs of this type of user that is (already, if not increasingly) frequently present at sites deploying Drupal. (Thus the cross-posting to multiple groups.)
Read moreEktron CMS400.NET
Ektron CMS400.NET (version 8.5 as of this writing) is targeted at Microsoft-oriented IT shops & developers building marketing-oriented sites. The company makes a determined effort to have some type of widget for everything under the sun, from document management to group spaces to calendar widgets to e-commerce & order processing, and on and on (with varying levels of depth & sophistication).
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