Posted by drumm on June 13, 2006 at 7:29pm
The disciples of usability, information architecture (IA), and design all fall under the category of user interface work. Usability work, by my understanding, is using formal methods, such as interviews, surveys, and observation, to quantitatively measure user needs, success, and satisfaction.
Right now this group is about usability and there is no home for IA and design. Should it be about IA and design as well?
Comments
Let's start somewhere
I'd like to see this group (or any group) become a home for Drupal contributers that want to improve the user interface of Drupal. At some point it might make sense to split off into sub groups that focus on specific things like user testing etc., but for now let's get the ball rolling.
I strongly agree to start (the sooner - the better)
That was the intention of my posting ( OpenUsability ).
We may use the Drupal Usability Engeneering-server (Dedicated root, AMD Opteron 144, 1G RAM, 2 mirrored SATA 80GB-HD), which is my private Drupal-development-server and where I'm trying to implement a bridge to ATutor to make surveys like this. It's also used for some SummerOfCode related development.
"Usability"
What you have here is fine for now - let's use it. The industry is starting to use the broader term "user experience" so that people do not quibble over usability vs. design vs. human factors vs. interaction design vs. whatever. Let's just work together to make the experience better.
Information architecture lead, ibm.com - Toledo, Ohio, USA
Hi Keith
You still here Keith? I'm thrilled.
I'd love to work with you guys to make things happen in the area of Drupal user experience (Drusex - anybody?).
I have - of course - far too many projects going on (startup company, building the danish drupal community etc), so I can't lead or drive this.
But I will make it a priority to participate with my knowledge and experience - 4 years drupal user, 8+ years information architecture, 5+ years interaction design/application design, 5+ years business strategy and consulting in community/professional networking systems.
Enough about me.
Here's what I think should be done.
We need to collect all relevant material from lists, handbooks etc related to user experience and sort into:
There is so much going on - modules for print friendly pages, themes that are addressing issues, snippets that solve issues, developers who work on certain stuff, users who complain - and it is not a coordinated effort.
We even have the civicspace people doing a lot of stuff - which is coordinated.
So for usability and user experience to work for Drupal - there need to be some kind of central coordination effort going on.
Is this the place to do it?
Are there people out there with time on their hands to do some of the grunt work?
Is there a person who can coordinate this?
Gunnar Langemark
www.langemark.com
Denmark
Gunnar Langemark
Denmark
Sure, there are people
which are much talking, but nothing doing ;)
My experience is something like that:
- Nobody is setting up an evaluation environment
- If you do it by yourself (like http://theme.drupaler.net/ for themes)
-- A lot of people are using it
-- Only a very few people are submitting information (voting / comments)
-- Noone is making suggestions (site enhancements)
- You will get tired
I would like to fix the modules black hole in a similar way, but this makes only sense when users are working with these tools.
I would strongly appreciate, if some of you would post votes to get the idea alive, or say what is missing.
To realize a global usability study is a utopic goal. So we should seperate it in independend tasks, like:
- Themes
- Modules
- Navigation / Structure
- Processes
- and so on
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see other Drupal evaluation scenarios to use.
Idea for getting started
I agree that it is better to keep all the IA/usabilty/design in this one place. I don't think anything too formal needs to be done to get started here. It seems to me that a good direction to get started on this work would be to handle this like you're doing a usability review for an application or site. That way we take a high level approach to identify what the areas of pain are, a low level of approach of defining those areas, and then step back again to assess the usability issues by priority and assign to developers. This is a suggestion (and sorry, I can't volunteer to head this up):
Just a suggestion if you're looking for a method to get started. Another good place to get started is surveying the Drupal project for open issues I suppose. Polling Drupal users about areas of pain may work to some extent.
I asked Kieran to start on
I asked Kieran to start on #1 a couple days ago. He has some data from awhile ago with the interviews and surveys he did; but he was concerned the data was too old and the notes retained were not good enough.