Posted by jpetso on March 26, 2008 at 9:41pm
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:
Comments
We hope to change this for
We hope to change this for Drupal: http://groups.drupal.org/node/9661.
That's gonna be awesome, but
That proposal seems to be tackling Celeste's point #3, "a defined functionality/tasks". Dries pretty much feeds us with #1, "a defined vision". webchick's drupal.org Personas resolve #2 ("a defined set of users") for drupal.org, but drupal.org as a web site isn't really representative for Drupal as a software.
As far as I can see, there's no clear answer on who uses Drupal and who we want to cater to ("everyone" is the wrong answer), so before taking on specific tasks it might be a good idea to ask which types of users Drupal targets at all. Especially the broadth of targeted potential admin users seems to me like it's not as well defined as other user research related parts.
Disclaimer: Not having been involved a lot with Drupal's usability initiatives, I might have missed some information, please don't beat me if something like Drupal (not drupal.org) personas exist already.
who uses drupal?
We did some work on this for the UMN testing, and learned a lot in the process - most of that work is at http://groups.drupal.org/node/7929 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/7878
Personally I think having a very short history of formal usability testing in Drupal, we should be focusing on the 'site maintainer/admin/editor' ballpark of users.
People who:
This happens to describe me about three years ago, and I imagine it describes a lot of people who use Drupal rather than using a specific website that happens to run on Drupal. Also I think it's hard to come up with defined personas. Most people doing Drupal site administration have some idea about how websites work, maybe a bit of html and css, and they can also be responsible for a bunch of different things.
So for testing purposes, I think at least initially, we should focus on people with some familiarity of dynamic websites (wiki, blog, some other CMS), but who've never used Drupal before (or failing that, only used it for a couple of weeks and not used X module before - at least for more informal testing). And then try to come up with very scoped tasks which that kind of person might end up doing - configuring a view to do X, making a new content type for X, creating and reorganising a book, setting up some forums, etc. etc.
So one overally persona that maps to various real personas - with that mapping done via the actual tasks/scenarios. In reality there's so much overlap between different roles in Drupal that making it much more fine-grained will probably best come later.
I would say most new Drupal
I would say most new Drupal users or users most likely to install Drupal, would be someone who not only has HTML, CSS or PHP experience but have also previously installed a website whether it be just a forum or a Word press blog.
Installing Theme X and Module Y is probably one of the first steps they take after activating core modules.
I'm not entirely certain if new users to Drupal would know they need to use CCK or Views. Most new users end up wanting to use Path auto as well (to remove /node from generated urls for their content.)
(The following persona's are based on Webchick's Personas:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/3761 )
Drupal currently works fine for:
Dan the Developer and Sally the System Adminstrator
Drupal considering its current state of user friendliness could be made easier for Tim the Tool-User. Wendy the Webmaster (along with Dan the Developer and Sally the System Administrator) would automatically inherit any improvement in user friendliness focused on Tim the Tool-User.
While not the perfect persona, I would select Tim the Tool User as the persona that Drupal Usability Improvements would benefit the most by focusing on. Wendy the Webmaster is the next best candidate (from the current available set of personas) but to focus on her would be to drive away a very large market of small business owners, or hobby site builders who, if they employ a site builder, would like to have some idea or control over the building of their site.
Drupal's user interface currently does cater (effectively since 4.x I think) to Tim the Tool-User (hence the number of small business and personal website builders looking for professional site builders in the paid forums) but there is enough room for improvement to bring in more of those users.
Danielle the Designer could be the next persona to be addressed.
Mary the Manager and Ellen the Evaluator would probably not use the internal admin interface of Drupal much less build an entire website on their own and hence usability improvements focused on similar persona(s) could be ineffective.
An additional way to look at how the persona(s) could be related to each other:
Mary the Manager and Ellen the Evaluator employs Dan the Developer, Sally the System Administrator and Danielle the Designer for large sites that require custom module building and dedicated server maintenance.
Tim the Tool User employs Wendy the Webmaster and Danielle the Designer for small business/community/personal websites that run on shared hosting and at most would require small patches to existing contributed modules than entirely new custom modules.
"Drupal currently works fine
"Drupal currently works fine for:
Dan the Developer and Sally the System Adminstrator"
I believe the testing specifically showed that the product presents a considerable learning curve for tech-savvy people, including people with PHP/HTML/CSS/Foo technology experience. Why should we care about Dan? Because Dan decides whether or not Drupal gets selected at all. If he has trouble figuring things out, he is unlikely to risk angry Tims.
Yes, I believe there are a few key personas to focus upon, we only had the resources and time to test one. There were a variety of other reasons why this choice made sense at the time (admin areas are subject to less change and theming decisions, for example, than for lower level users).
But I do agree in general that a wider strategic discussion should probably happen.
These are great places to start. And it's good to see this (very healthy) discussion happening.