Amsterdam UX Sprint: Ideas for 2014-2015

At Amsterdam Drupalcon, a group of UX designers and usability specialists (lisarex, yoroy, danigrrl, lewisnyman, bojhan, dagmar and others) met to decide on some goals for moving Drupal UX forward in 2014-2015.

To that end, we identified three high-level things we wanted to accomplish:

• Make it easy and obvious for module maintainers to improve the design of their project
• Make it easy to correctly apply admin styles to their modules by providing a style guide
• Find useful and applicable design documentation
• Facilitate communication between developers and designers, including:
• helping contrib & core maintainers find designers to help them with UI/usability issues;
• helping designers connect with maintainers to more effectively propose design or UX changes to their modules
• Reduce the barriers to contribution, and help potential and current contributors better understand:
• how to get started
• how to be effective as a contributor
• how to avoid burnout and add people to their team when needed
• find design-related projects to contribute to based on participant skills and time constraints

To this end, we've established a preliminary proposal to revamp design.drupal.org, which will be the home of the Drupal UI style guide documentation, as well as a central place for:

• designers to learn:
• how to contribute as a designer
• Link to relevent sections of Drupal.org for further contributions and learning
• developers to learn:
• how the design process works,
• where/how/who to ask for help
• design documentation
• Showcasing successful application of the design process within the Drupal community

We'll be discussing this in more detail in the coming months. The preliminary goal is to get a basic site up and running at the design.drupal.org URL by January 2015.