Hi folks, I just finished reading the Report from the University of Minnesota Drupal Usability Testing and found it very interesting reading, and not at all surprising.
First point of interest to me for this group (Web Managers/Content editors) is the defined target audience:
All eight of our participants are people directly in Drupal's target audience. They are site builders, already using tools such as Dreamweaver and WordPress. They know HTML and understand how the web works. All but one had no prior experience in Drupal.
I would broaden the group to include non-site builders, who nonetheless are web managers/content managers/content editors, and/or non-coders. It would be interesting to see the differences, if any would arise. Some of the confusion with Wordpress might or might not be seen. I would venture a guess that some of the confusion about what content goes where would remain.
Thinking back on my experience with IPM, while I knew already that blocks were for sidebar content, the difference in what each could contain didn't really hit me until late in the design/development process, when I wound up adding html tables to main content, since I had little choice, needing to style main content somehow.
What do you think about when reading the report and comments?
Comments
Link to decision on the target audience
I suggested this during the discussion of who the target group would be.
That said, I understand and agree with why they chose the group they did. One is that previous usability testing for D6 focused on site builders, so they had a baseline to compare to. Two is that the admin interface for end users may be different for any given site.
The latter issue could be a great topic for discussion here. When we had an end user focused user group meeting back in April, it came out that Drupal's flexibility provides serious difficulties for training web managers on how to use it. As a group we couldn't come up with any good one-size-fits-all type of resources, because everyone's interface is going to differ depending on what modules they have installed and how their content types are built. The best we could come up with is that everyone with a Drupal site to manage needs to list out their biggest pain points, figure out how to work through them in their own site, and document it. (And from that idea a Drupal drop-in clinic was setup at DrupalCamp Twin Cities, where end users could seek guidance from site builders on how to use their particular site.)
I'd be really interested in others' thoughts on this.
I understand their choice
I understand their choice better now, @jasonsamuels, so thanks for letting us know.
I continue thinking about the issues you mention re training Drupal web managers. I understand that setups are different, content types are different, etc. Still, do developers have difficulty? If not, why not?
How did the Drupal drop-in clinic at DrupalCamp Twin Cities do? Did anyone do any writeups? I agree that this would be great to discuss further.
Best, Marilyn
I didn't actually spend much
I didn't actually spend much time at the drop-in clinic unfortunately, as I was running around doing A/V support and attending other sessions. It seemed to be going well at the times I popped my head in though.
I don't know of any writeups of the drop in clinic, but here's one I did of a session at DrupalCon Chicago called Baby Got Backend: Content administrators are users too.: http://goingtodrupalcon.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/baby-got-backend-conten...