Notes: Usability BoF at DrupalCon Denver

On Thursday, March 22, 2012, @lisarex and I ran a BoF to talk about Usability. First of all, we would like to thank every one who could make it to the session. For the others who could not make it, here is the summary from the session.

Since the group was a mix of new and existing contributors, the focus was on what we “the usability team” could do to make things better for the community.

I encouraged new contributors who are interested in conducting inexpensive usability tests, to explore usertesting.com. It is a service that is relatively cheap and efficient. @lisarex and I have conducted several sessions at various camps on how to do this.
Slides from our session at DrupalCamp NJ

Usability Feed

Lewisnyman suggested that the HTML 5 group have implemented a way to push feeds about their workings/happenings to the larger group. Usability team could also use this approach for increased awareness.

Project Management

From the discussion, the need for project management was obvious. The team needs to device a plan as to how this could and should be done.

Introductions, say “Hi”

@yoroy encouraged potential contributors to join Groups.Drupal.org/Usability and say “Hi” to the introductions thread with their interests to get involved.

How do I contribute?

The biggest concern of the attendees was to understand as to how they can contribute to this aspect of the project. Unfortunately, the usability group (like the Drupal project) does not have a way to do. The attendees want a list of technical knowledge required and the time commitment required for helping a part of the project.
I had started a spreadsheet (work in progress) to track what is tested and what needs testing. The spreadsheet follows the design principle of 80% use case. Trying to test the 80% use case first and then move.
This spreadsheet as mentioned, is a work in progress and needs to iterate to allow more concrete basis to be able to solve this problem. However, this needs to extend beyond usability testing.

Other things:

The team also tried to convince the attendees to create issues on D.O. that haven’t been done yet from the Google usability study conducted by @technicka, @garencheckley and @jenlampton.

On a separate note, the team did not get to discuss that needs attention is “What is the plan for DrupalCon Munich?”, “What is that we need to accomplish before the next DrupalCon?”

Please add notes (as comments) that I may have missed from the session.