I am writing this post to introduce myself and to invite both developers and UX designers to discuss a concept that I think is central to UX systems design - that of the User Narrative.
I am a UX designer and software developer with over 20 years of experience in the commercial software industry. Over the last 4 years I have shifted my focus from desktop to web applications. The last 3 years have been almost entirely spent on learning the ins and outs of building web sites on the Drupal platform.
During that time I've taken note of where I see aspects of the internal architecture impacting on my ability to carry out user experience design as precisely as I would like. To capture some of these thoughts, I've begun to post a series of articles on my web site, the first group being concerned with this concept of the User Narrative.
This group of articles (still unfinished with 2 more to go) is called 'Users, Roles and Narratives'. I consider this area to be of fundamental importance for any user interface system and especially applicable to Drupal. I use the term 'User Narrative' to mean the story that is told to a user, either implicitly or explicitly, within a given user interface. I believe this story aspect holds the potential to carry much of the burden of usability fulfillment in any user interface system – but especially so with web applications.
The thrust of these articles is to make a case for greater systematic control by UX designers of user-facing text (AKA strings) in order to permit a practical means of designing and implementing intentional (rather than accidental) User Narratives. I begin with an overview of the importance of Role oriented UX design and draw a distinction between this definition of Roles and the customary Drupal usage of the term.
I believe the articles raise some useful questions and present a valuable frame of reference that touches simultaneously on design and development issues. I think this line of discussion could help Drupal developers and UX designers find some new strategies for tackling a variety of usability challenges.
I'm new to posting on drupal.org. I'm looking forward to some good discussions on this and other issues that I've been following from the sidelines. Any suggestions for other threads to check out would be appreciated.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Michael Keara
@useradvocate
www.tuag.ca
Comments
1.1 and 1.2 are good reads.
1.1 and 1.2 are good reads. Your mapping of user/persona/roles/tasks, etc. brought home how ux can be better fulfilled using the role based and user narrative design philosophy. There's a discussion here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/130439 which you may find useful in presenting your thoughts. The "Harmonic User Narrative" is an elusive ideal depending on the number of roles a person has in need of fulfillment at any given moment, the kind of design which can irk privacy groups a lot. Gmail has on more than one occasion presented me with offensive ads. Programs still cannot parallel process as well as humans. Memristors are one way to bridge the gap, but I digress... Anyway, later on, you seem to advocate more abstraction, top-down design, and if I had a better understanding of how drupal themes modules work, and read the rest of the articles, I would be able to discuss further. I'm also wondering what needs to be done for html5. Try http://groups.drupal.org/design-drupal for additional replies on this topic regarding the semantics friendly architectural changes you're looking for. If you have more abstraction, then it will require more system resources. Drupal has alot of functions for the output of functions, but I do understand that having more code be UX friendly is good. The Butler project is the flip side of the design philosophy, more oriented in solving the backend stuff, which is designed to minimize consumption and make more efficient use of system resources (intro): http://groups.drupal.org/node/129004
Both approaches needed.
[Edited.]
Thanks for the links
I appreciate your taking the time to provide feedback and the links. Certainly the harmonic user narrative is an ideal goal and very elusive. I wanted to point to it anyway because I like to keep such ideals in mind. My general approach to design problems is to scan the horizon for larger context and then focus on working closer to home (or 'reality').
Interesting what you said about the meaning of this in terms of Google's 'harmonizing' with our private emails. I guess my concern was no so much an 'automatic' response such as Google's but more of an intentional design strategy, based on a clear idea of what Roles are and which Roles may apply to a given interface.
One challenge I know I have here, in terms of writing articles and posts etc, is that I'm talking about both improving the top down design capability and fixing certain back end issues that impede this capability. I need to understand more about the many threads of discussion within the community in order to fine tune my points and perhaps my language.
Thanks also for the pointer to the Butler project. I intend to check that out more thoroughly. I admire Larry Garfield's approach to things.
Michael Keara
User Interface Systems Architect,
The User Advocate Group
Welcome!
Thanks for introducing yourself. We are certainly planning to further improve the user interface copy writing for Drupal 8. We've made good progress in D7 with just removing redundant descriptions and rewording things using simpler words. The main challenge for Drupal will be to define the main narratives, because as an application, a base Drupal install is not focussed on a specific use case.
I hope I can convince you to not only discuss (which is good) but also take action and get some actual text fixes in! Starting at slide 46 there's a summary of our general advice on ui text for core and module developers: http://www.slideshare.net/Bojhan/drupal-7-interface-pattern.
Thanks again, your input is valuable and much appreciated. If you ever are on IRC, say hi in #drupal-contribute or #drupal-usability and talk some more.
I recommend that the reader
I recommend that the reader especially pays attention toward the end. At the start of it, it provided a variety of methods on eliminating unnecessary redundancy, info, and navigation.
It didn't get into visual cues enough to give UI more impact, and should be the focus of more work. Tabs, contextual links, and vertical tabs are examples of visual cues in providing navigation/menus.
Good info.
Follow up
Roy, thanks for welcome and for the link to your slides and the IRC info. I will join in discussion there. :)
With regards to follow up activity, I'm going to focus primarily on the issue of string management. I believe I'll need to do a lot of further clarification and reiteration of my premise that User Narratives are a central part of defining user experience and User Narratives are difficult to control in Drupal, largely because of current practices around the use of the t() function. For example, there seems to be a lot of discussion about the quality of 'out-of-the-box' user experiences and also discussions about prioritizing one set of users over another - my belief is that both these key issues can be effectively addressed through well defined User Narratives.
Making this case is unlikely to be a short term effort but I'm prepared to put more energy into it. The next step will be to finish my series of articles with 2 more posts. The first will be a description of a string management module that I've created and deployed on various sites and the second will be a description of a vision for multi-faceted 'out-of-the-box' pleasurable UX.
Looking forward to more discussion. :)
Michael
Michael Keara
User Interface Systems Architect,
The User Advocate Group