At Drupalcon 2009 in Washington, the Drupal design community were asked to become active participants in contributing feedback to the Drupal project.
mfer was kind enough to give members of the Design for Drupal (D4D) Group a tour of how we could provide feedback through the Issue Queue. As a matter of fact, we were shown a version of the issue queue in which any project could be flagged as "needs design review".
A few days later, it's disappeared. Gone with it is an invaluable way of having designers and usability experts provide detailed, granular feedback to the Drupal project. A hugely important channel of communication has been cut.
Without it, the design and usability folks in the Drupal community are left to have toothless debate in drupal.org and groups.drupal.org. As you know that dialog is typically not specific enough, nor is it as productive as direct feedback.
I'm sure that anyone can release a project much faster without having "pesky" designers review it, but there's little hope of Drupal improving much without that extra review. I think it would show tragically poor judgment to exclude design and usability from the code review process.
@modulist
Hopefully, someone will prove me wrong, and it wasn't missing at all...
Comments
I couldn't imagine it would
I couldn't imagine it would disappear on purpose. A design review by someone even slightly qualified is a very valuable service. Where was it initially?
"We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm." - Winston Churchill
work: http://www.entermedianow.com
blog: http://www.nicklewis.org
"We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm." - Winston Churchill
work: http://www.chapterthree.com
blog: http://www.nicklewis.org
Needs design review
The tag is still there. It is named "Needs design review". You can tag any issue on d.o with it (just unfold the "Tags" fieldset at the bottom of the issue comment form).
You can list all issues having this tag on http://drupal.org/project/issues-term/523
Let design come to Drupal!
Damien Tournoud
http://drupalfr.org
Damien Tournoud
"Needs design review", well, needs design review
Wow, I couldn't have found it without you, Damien. And even with your help it was truly difficult.
After an hour of searching, it finally turned up. This is not a status but a deeply, deeply buried bit of content instead. You'd have to try entering a string of text inside an AJAX interface inside a collapsed fieldgroup at the very bottom of a form to find it. You have to admit this is pretty obscure.
I'm happy to see that it hasn't been killed off entirely, but this is hardly a front door for designers to provide feedback. What would it take to have this listed with patch (code needs work)?
The Drupal community does want our input, I hope.
@modulist
@modulist
I search the issue queue for
I search the issue queue for the words, "design" or "needs design review". Or you can just track dvessel or yoroy. They usually have their finger on the pulse for design issue bugs. :-p
Collaborate using tags
Changing project status items is incredibly hard. Remember Dries' call for collaboration over planning? That's what the tags functionality in the issue queues enables. You can tag absolutely anything, anywhere, in core or contrib, with any tag.
This allows any group to have a cross cut of issues that they can track and review. Another example might be "performance". While many core issues do get flagged as not being allowed to be committed until benchmarks are performed, there is no special status for this. Some particular issues or patches might be excellent for "high performance" sites, and can be tagged as such.
I would suggest tagging core items with "needs design review", or, even more simply, the hopefully soon to be famous "d4d". Even if the code of something passes muster, please RE-open issues that don't pass design muster, and tag with D4D.
I haven't really covered the core project status items. Let's just say that it will be extremely hard to get additional items into that list. Looking at patch, we have needs review, needs work, RTBC, and to be ported. Adding "needs testing on Postgres", "needs work on SQLLite", "someone please test this sucka on IE6" etc. etc. starts getting really completed. Hence, tags.
Go forth and collaborate. I would suggest creating a tagging team and tagging some issues, and also putting a block / panel / link on the front page of the D4D so it's easy to find those issues.