Drupal Home Redesign - A Project / Product managers POV

So this is my first post in the Drupal Community – I will warn you that this is LONG and may seem to be off-topic but I promise I will pull it all together (I hope)…

I was inspired to “bite the bullet” after attending one day @Boston DrupalCon. I think that my hesitation to post on Drupal or participate in any Drupal groups is an indication of the need to work on redesigning the home of Drupal.
You might now be wondering why I was hesitating…. Well the first reason was I was not sure how I could really be a part of this community. I run a development group – I have 5 Drupal Engineers as part of my team. They are the coders – the Drupal Gurus – not me.

I deal with project and product management. I work with clients on gathering requirements and manage the resources of the team to meet deadlines and budgets. I do have a technology background (in ASP – I know Bleck…) but I quickly realized that as much as I love technology and all of the benefits that can be gained from it – I did not enjoy the creations of the technology – it is the business side that interests me – what problems can be solved, how can efficiencies be gained, what would be ‘wicked cool’… So I switched sides.

So how does a project / product manager help out the community?
A. I don’t know how to write test cases in simpletest
B. I can’t create a module
C. I have no desire it run my own installation of Drupal (or a LAMP server) to install modules and test their usability

To me this is a problem – I would imagine that there are a lot of people out there like me – interested in technology, strong thoughts on feature sets and usability from an end users point of view, focused on organization of tasks and timeline and are willing to spend some of our own time being a part of a community like this – but have no idea how… I think that if the Drupal community is widening the reach of Drupal then people with the above skill sets need to be involved - Gaining the product/project managers vote goes a long way in a company.

The second reason that I was leery to about posting anything was the site can come across as aggressive. (Ok really for me it is the first reason I listed as I don’t have a fragile sensibility) but I did notice that the site is intimidating. I have read posts where there are “Strong” opinions stated and for individuals who are confrontation adverse – that will limit their contributions. I don’t like to stereotype but the site is very masculine and the mixture of masculinity in the look / feel, engineering focused organization of information, and tone of community interaction may be a factor for many women interesting in getting more involved in technology but not participating in Drupal. I think those factors may be enough to deter them from “biting that bullet” and joining in (Does that count as pulling it all together?)

Okay – that was a bit of a rambling but I am opinionated and wanted to “share” my thoughts on areas that could use ‘a little love’ during the redesign.

1.Showcase Drupal theme power on Drupal.org

When I am looking at a new product – visual display / organization of data counts for a lot – it either grabs my attention to dig in deeper or I get frustrated I can’t find what I want and I am not impressed by what I see thus I leave and go look somewhere else. Engineers typically don’t do this but us folks on the business side – it is a sad truth. There are a lot of great looking Drupal site on the web – I think that there is a lot of IA / UI changes that can be made to enhance the site greatly. A couple of examples are – left hand navigation – that is where my eyes want to go – but everything is top tabs or on the right. Many pages have second tabs under the first – as the usability assessment of the Drupal 6 admin showed (and this counts for me as well) those are not as well seen as left hand navigation. Users have been trained by the likes of AOL / Yahoo / MSN to look to the left for where to go next or see where they are, there are some pages that have a top, sub-top, left and right navigation – I am not sure where to look or what goes where. I can try to focus some more effort on this topic if there is interest… Has an IA site map been created for Drupal.org?

2.Don’t highlight the security issues as the first real content you see on the home page

I understand that software has security issues and I expect to update software – but on first look on a site – I don’t want to see critical alerts in BIG BOLD letters… If I did not know much about the software that might be enough to make me wonder if this software is going to be too hard to maintain for my company. I am not suggesting that there is no reference to security updates but can it not be the main focus of the home page?

3.Confusion of Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org and forums

I can say that the separation of these two sites confused me – I was logged into Drupal.org but went to groups page by clicking on a link in the right navigation and I was all of a sudden not logged in. I needed to sign-up again? Then I went to forums and there were working groups on topics – but there are also group groups on these types of topics – a bit of confusion for me.

4.Group pages for “feature sets” listing modules

I would find it really useful if in the social networking or performance groups – there was a list of all the modules tagged to those topics. I think that this would be the first step to gaining a feature focus approach vs. independent modules. When I start a new project for a client – I end up on the module page for a long time sorting through the categories listed – many of which are not feature focused. The ability to tag/group modules to display in a feature list by project vertical is something that I think would be a benefit to the community.

5.“Help Text”

In one of our client sites (a Drupal site) we implemented the concept of a “marketing block” that can be added to the top of any page via the admin interface – so that marketing can add a pretty image and text to help inform users on why they are at that page. It is useful and not nearly as cumbersome as creating full FAQ pages (which we are now in the process of doing for my client and I feel would be useful here as well). But those blocks are a start and helpful.

1. Sell –Sell – Sell

The Drupal.org site does not sell Drupal – there is one block at the top of the page but I couldn’t find testimonials on how great Drupal was for the different demographics – schools, Small Business, Non-Profit, Larger Corporations, etc.. And any case studies around them. Examples are the best way to introduce potential users of the software. I know that developers will go straight for the code and Drupal.org does a good job getting developers the information they need quickly – but with growth comes a new demographic on the site that needs information targeted to them.

7.Organization

It might be that my mind works a certain way and it is just different than Drupal.org or groups.drupal.org but I am often confused on where to look for things and get lost. After my day at Drupalcon – I tried to look up D7 Project Management – to see what was needed and if there was a way I could help out – but I could not find anything on it. This is beyond the navigation issue I discussed above – it is even categorization that I just can’t get my hands around – though as I use the site more – it gets easier – the beginning was a bit rough.

8.Search

The search takes a while and there is no advanced search options that would make sense to the non-drupal user (searching by content type of Book – I don’t know which items on the site are a book vs. a story vs. a project). I think that enhancing the search capability of the site will greatly benefit any user who are having a hard time finding information

1. Module Demos / Screenshots / Status

When looking at modules and getting all excited by the short title / description – you go an open the module page – and realize that you have no idea what this is really going to do for your customer without having a member of the development team install it in a sandbox for you. It would be REALLY useful if there were screenshots of end user and admin or even better a demo place to check out the module. I know that there are modules where this type of information would not be useful but there are many that would (some have this type of information but it would be great to see more of this). I also think that it would be beneficial to see stats on the modules – in the support section to see “Downloaded 5,000 times and Pending Bug Reports (5)” will give you a different opinion then “Downloaded 70 times and Pending Bug Report (65). It would also be nice to see somewhere on the main module page to see if test cases have been created for it, if it has been reviewed by other for usability, coding standards, etc

1. Tutorials

This was also discussed during the usability session for how to do admin things – but I think that a quick 5 minute flash tutorial on how to get the most out of the Drupal community would be engaging – I know that there is a lot of things out there for contributing patches / modules / reporting issues… But something quick and easy on the eyes may drag in people you may have lost otherwise.

Ok - well if you made it this far - Thanks for reading :)

Smile
Sharon