Possible Usability projects?

So while the project could start with wireframes, at the end of the day they need something actually coded up and turned into Google. And I have a feeling that if the project was 80% design and 20% code it might not qualify.

Try fleshing this idea out a bit more (picking a specific area/areas and specific goals) and let's check again and see if it looks like a good project. :)

Can we also add this thread to the Usability group?

Bevan/

I am really thrilled by the recent pushes in improving Drupal's UI - one thing that I am concerned by though is that a lot of the UI improvement discussion focusses on the 'site builder end' of Drupal - with site builder end I mean specifically whatever's under /admin : module page, block page, content construction, etc.

While this is an important part to improve (I am having some blatant shortcomings presented at DrupalCon Boston UI session in mind), I am much more worried about those parts of Drupal that I, as a site builder, need to expose to editors and contributors of the site: the node form, the help pages, contact form, user sign up forms, emails that get sent out etc.

I am usually more working in system architecture and planning, but this weekend I built a D6 site for my building's Tenant Association and while I found a frickin awesome theme (marinelli :) and the install process of D6 looks pretty slick, explaining the node form to my neighbors made me sad and improving it had cost more time than I had available :(

Alex

Sooo, I was brainstorming the other night and came up with what I think would be a really helpful tool in being able to assess usability.

I'd like to see a web interface in which a group of privileged users have the ability to quickly and easily set up a environment to conduct usability testing in, and have all the data automatically captured in some useful way. Here's a basic walkthrough of how I would (hopeful) see this working:

I'd like to see some sort of a control panel where a test administrator can select the version of drupal they'd like to conduct usability testing on, and have it spawn a virtualhost instance, with the selected version of drupal installed along with a module set which helps capture data (clickheat it the main one i'm thinking of here, but i'm sure there are other candidates). The site would then being capturing data as the test administrator conducted testing, allowing for a method to easily reset to the default state between users. At the end of testing the testing site would generate the clickheat results and partitioned server logs for each user, and then wipe itself from the file system/apache.

Ideally the testing tool would be able to grab head from CVS and apply patches as well, so we can easily conduct usability testing on patches which we think will effect usability. However I don't know what the feasibility of having testers using HEAD really is, hopefully 100% testing coverage would make things stable enough during the development cycle that we could give it a try, but the current state of HEAD isn't such that you could put a novice user in there and ask them to perform tasks, because things would be broken. It may be a pipe dream, but it's at least a good goal.

Anyway, just a thought, certainly details need to be flushed out, but the general idea it to be able to REALLY quickly set up a testing environment, so we can concentrate on the problem of getting testers, and not on all the details of setting up the environment etc. I think this would go a long way towards making usability testing a constant process.

Is anyone aware of a list of UI tweaks site builders can do for "end users" right out of the box? Without using a special module I would like to know simple things some of you have improved usability. I'm sure this will be as simple as "hide this field for this user role" but I'm sure there are common things you're disabling for your basic joe-schmoe content contributer with each new website. Thanks in advance for any useful tips.