Posted by Bevan on November 25, 2007 at 10:06pm
UI-Patterns.com is a great resource for information architects, UX designers, UI specialists, but most of all, for developers!
How can something like this be made more useful and usable by developers of both drupal core and contrib? I would like to see usability start at drupal's roots, rather than being left for an after-thought. (This too-often results in interfaces that are harder to fix than they would have been to get right the first time).
I think a short usability guide specifically for drupal developers would be a big step in that direction. I would like to compose / compile such a 'drupal usability guide', but I'm not sure how such a usability guide can be made usable for drupal developers. Any ideas?
Comments
Excellent plan.
There's work being done to get freetagging in the issue que. If used responsibly, I think that would be an excellent way to get UI related feedback earlier in the process (tag it with "ui" or "usability"): http://drupal.org/node/187480
I'm not a developer myself but a good way to get some relevant feedback could be to ask around in IRC.
Great idea
With such a guide, developers could save time spent trying to figure out how to lay things out. It would also make for a more consistent experience if module developers used the same patterns.
In Drupal core there are very few "UI elements": tables, tabs, buttons, fieldsets. What else? So it's easier to find adequate ways to solve common problems.
I think compiling the patterns as problem/answer tips would be useful.
e.g. "My admin page is very long" -> possible solutions: 1. Blah blah... 2. Blah blah...
"how should I display images in a gallery?", "how should I display tags in a content?", "where should I put this or that", that kind of problems.
Or it could be presented as longer handbook pages in a "UI patterns" section, with tips on specific topics: "admin pages" (this one would probably have to be split into several child pages), "galleries", "lists", "tabular data"...
Elv, I agree it should be
Elv, I agree it should be use-case-centric (not pattern-centric like ui-patterns.com is). The developers that I would most like to appeal to with such a usability guide are the developers that are least 'usability-aware' and don't naturally think ui-centricaly. (I mean no discredit to them by that. In fact I stand in awe of their contributions. But some people are simpler better at things like writing and rewriting complex APIs and code, while others (usually not the same people) are better at relating to how a user or persona understands the form or data presented to them on a page.)
So presenting the developer with use-cases that say something like;
Bevan/
ghop task, could you mentor it?
Hi Bevan, I've suggested to make "find and document 5 ui-patterns in Drupal core" a task for the Google Highly Open Participation contest (see http://drupal.org/node/195913). Would you be available to oversee and help if a student decides to take on this task? I'm certainly not qualified to do it myself, but I think it could be a nice way to kickstart the usability guide. check #drupal-ghop in IRC and/or http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-drupal/ (though I haven't posted the task yet). Thanks.
I'm interested, but I'm not
I'm interested, but I'm not sure that this is a suitable task for the types of students that would be a part of the programme. Write it up on google code and we can see if anyone expresses interest and take it from there.
Bevan/
Design pattern? Multiple points of entry for administration
Just as Drupal has the concept of content that can appear and be edited from multiple places, I think making administration options that can be edited from multiple locations.
I'm thinking specifically about per-content type default workflow options such as published, front page, sticky should also be configurable from another settings location as a series of node type checkboxes per attribute-- not just when editing a node type having a set of attribute checkboxes.
I bring this up here because I don't even know how to begin to think through the usability / UI ramifications of this approach, but I'm betting someone has.
http://ui-patterns.com/ itself reads more like a set of features we should make available in Drupal for people to meet their user interface needs.
~ ben melançon
member, Agaric Design Collective
http://AgaricDesign.com - "Open Source Free Software Web Development"
benjamin, agaric
Crosslink: SoU
This topic is being discussed in the SoU project possibilities: http://groups.drupal.org/node/7965
Bevan/