Links for finding what to work on, where discussion happens and how the process works.
Discussion
- Feel free to post your idea or question in this usability group
- Day to day chats in #drupal-usability on IRC
We have IRC meetings twice a week for more structured discussion and planning:
- Tuesdays, 21:00/9pm CET (convert to other timezone)
- Wednesdays, 09:00/9am CET (convert to other timezone)
Topics
Current focus
Drupal UX challenges
Usability work in the issue queue
We use tags to group related issues:
- "usability" is the catch-all tag. Add it to all issues that impact the user interface or workflow in some way.
- "needs usability review" is used when design feedback is needed for an issue to move forward. Remove it after giving the necessary input for the work to continue.
- "needs design" for when new user interface ideas in the form of wireframes, mockups are needed
- Issues of type "Plan" are the umbrella issues for larger efforts in the issue queue, listing all other issues related to it.
If you are interested in providing design feedback, follow these "issue design tips".
Context
Direction
- Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert on “How do we keep Drupal relevant and widen Drupal's adoption by improving the user experience (UX)?”
Process
Small design changes are usually directly discussed and worked on in the issue queue.
- Create an issue to report the problem. Explain how and why the current state has problems. Is it inconsistent, too difficult, is the workflow not as expected?
- Suggest improvements. Suggest one or more ways to improve the situation
- Discuss to get the full picture of trade-offs to make: who to improve this for?
- Get to consensus: agree on the solution
- Support developers with additional design decisions that come up during implementation
- Review the changes in a working Drupal installation (use https://simplytest.me/)
Larger projects: we still need to figure out how this works for the really big ones, but it will work something like this:
- Discuss and plan the work in http://groups.drupal.org/usability. Outline the goals, provide context, show why this change will be beneficial/is necessary
- Build a team.
- Document the assumptions for the improved situation: how would it work, what would it look like, how could we measure its success?
- Generate multiple ideas in the form of sketches, mockups and quick prototypes
- Decide which prototype(s) to submit to a usability test
- Plan, script, execute the usability test
- Analyze the results, rework the prototype where needed and test again if necessary
- Specify what's needed for actual implementation
- Support implementation with additional design decisions
You can join the discussion on this here. We have to set up a tool that allows for big picture overview of all moving parts in such a big project.
Documentation
- UI-standards
- This includes reports on previous usability testing
Design resources & tools
- We're lacking good reference visuals for Seven, the default admin theme
- We also need a good set of visual assets for people to work with for creating high-fidelity mockups
- Related as well: we don't have a working solution for storing and sharing the above
Comments
Low hanging fruit?
I've been quietly watching some of the discussion around UX and I have to ask: "Is there any meat to the topic or is the plan to simply tackle as many low hanging fruits as possible, then jump on new low hanging fruits when they emerge?"
I'm excited to see what comes out of the usability discussion but it feels very dis-organized at this point. Hope to see that change.
More structure, more clarity
I would have to second phis thought. This is extremely unstructured way of discussion. And a bit confusing. May be putting a task list together would help for the start.
Point taken that a post like
Point taken that a post like this is unstructured and all over the place.
We just launched http://drupalux.org which is a taskboard for issues in different UX topics, do you think that might work better?
Also, did you see https://groups.drupal.org/node/510551, it's a discussion on how we could change the design process itself to be more well-structured.
@yoroy drupalux.org is the
@yoroy drupalux.org is the perfect springboard for this issue and I'm excited to see the direction it goes :)
Better Clarification
@yoroy, In all honesty, What I would love to see out of drupalux.org is not only the place for issues revolving around UX, but a "from the ground up" theory, plan, implementation and evolution of Drupal UX.
I strongly believe that Drupal is in a prime position to become one of the web industry leaders for how to do UX well. I've noticed there is very little in the way of documentation on the theory and known best practices other than what has been put together at usability.gov which I haven't decided if I like, or find to be rather sad that a government entity had to take it upon itself to declare UX because "no one else has". I can see why though. UX is all over the place with no real standards or guidelines of where to begin or what to look for... Usability has become this realm of "it looks good over there and I like it, so I'm going to use it" as opposed to a tried and true A/B tested methodology of what actually works.
So, drupalux.org in my mind, should be the place where UX is defined for Drupal. Usabililty test results that helped dictate decisions etc. I would also like to see UX gain its own set of APIs within Drupal core. Developers should be able to easily tie into core to define their own set of usability needs, without having to override entire sections of core to accomplish it. For example, an API that deals with "is going to happen", "is happening" and "did happen". I don't mind core having it's own UX for these rules but I believe developers would love the ability to easily override them with various libraries or themes to make it their own. I strongly believe the lack of this ability where UX is concerned, is the major reason many design firms have decoupled Drupal in favor of a frontend framework that allows them to override UX from the ground up.
These are some loose ideas at the moment, but I hope to see Drupalux.org become that place. A domain and website synonymous with drupal.org.
Thank you
Thanks for expanding on this, it's good to hear what people might expect from this resource. I agree it would be great if drupalux.org would provide all the things you mention :)
We had d7ux.org for the ux efforts around Drupal 7, but that website is sadly no longer online. That's why we focus on keeping key information on drupal.org as much as possible. https://www.drupal.org/ui-standards collects what we currently have on UI patterns, guidelines and usability testing results.
It's true that we're starting with the more tactical stuff of highlighting the right issues etc. High-level strategy, design principles and priorities need some time to hash out, but we're definately working on that as well.
As for not finding docs on theory, are you maybe looking for (the Drupal version of) things like https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/, http://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ or https://www.gov.uk/design-principles ?
Editor experience
Hi Everyone,
Anyone in Editor UX?
b.w.