| Last post | Posting participants | Posts | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forum | Yesterday | 396 | 533 |
| Issue queue | Today | 128 | 189 |
| Group | 57 days ago | 9 | 30 |
| Flickr tag | 60 days ago | 11 | 21 |
as of January 19th
The forum and issue queue are noisy. Many ideas are posted by many people, but few are acted upon. It is an excellent source of raw, unfiltered reactions and ideas. These are useful to pay attention to as a first step, listening to users.
The group and Flickr tag are more focused. Fewer participants are making specific suggestions. However, the conversations are stagnant- nothing new has been posted in almost three months. This may be due in part to Drupal's development cycle; this time was a code freeze and interesting usability improvements, more than pushing pixels around and rewriting text, could not get into Drupal. The next few months will show the usefulness of the group and Flickr tag.
Caveats
The issue queue is the tool of choice for making things happen in a specific project. Unfortunately, the usability issue queue does not have a specific project. There are separate queues for Drupal core and the Drupal.org website. In order to get something done with a usability issue, it has to be refiled to the relevant project. The people looking at those projects often overlook the usability issues filed off in another queue.
Flickr is explicitly for photos. That means they can and do take actions to promote photos over screenshots, such as the not in public site area (NIPSA) status. NIPSA combined with the disconnectedness of Flickr from the rest of Drupal's infrastructure causes Flickr posts to be overlooked.
Potential
There are around 100,000 Drupal websites, many of which have involved usability practitioners. There are usability practitioners invested in Drupal. If they go to the forum they are in the same place as every other Drupal user with a problem or idea. The same applies to the issue queue, with the addition of not being seen with other improvements in the queue for specific projects. The Flickr tag can be overlooked as well. The group simply hasn't taken off.
What is the best way to connect people with usability experience, skills, and knowledge with people with the experience, skills, and knowledge to make these improvements reality? There is great potential, there are plenty of people on both sides.
The path for contributing a technical fix is well-defined. Post an issue to the appropriate issue queue, a patch is written, reviewed, and rewritten until it is ready to commit. If it passes the final review, then we are done. The path for a user interface change is much less clear. There is no clear place to start or way to ensure that the work actually gets moved into the implementation stage. This never will be clear, a user interface change requires a set of people with the skills to design, implement, review, and commit the changes. Getting those people together won't be solved technically. How can we create a community where it does happen socially?