Season of Usability

With DrupalCon, moving house, and some other factors I have been struggling financially recently and have needed to focus on billable work in order to make ends meet. An influx of urgent client work also contributed to this. Such I haven't found or made time in the last couple of weeks to continue node-form development. This is a status update so that interested parties can keep up with the status of the Season of Usability project.

On Monday I started researching recent efforts to date on node forms. There has been a lot of activity in this area recently and things have really taken off this week -- largely pushed by newcomer to the usability group: SteveJB.

I've been mulling on the ideas for project goals over the weekend and have decided that my goal for the project is:

Improve the usability of node add and edit forms in drupal 7

This is something Chx placed emphasis on in our initial discussion, and Nick Lewis gave 5 very convincing arguments for. Thanks to everyone for your great feedback. I really appreciate it.

What are the goals for the project?

Now that the project is ready to go, we need to establish the goals for the project. I have several general ideas. Please suggest more.

1. General Improvements for Drupal Core (based on results of UMN usability lab testing)
2. Node-add/edit Forms
3. Usability Guide/Handbook for Drupal Developers
4. UI Patterns for Drupal
5. Managing Many Items With Tables, with;
   • links to items and related objects
   • data display columns
   • operations individual items
   • operations on multiple items
   • filters
   • table headers
   • sorts
   • pagination
6. Fix 'local tasks' (Tabs) (Split into, local actions/operations, local navigation)
7. General Improvements for Selected Contrib Modules; Panels, CCK, Views, Imagecache?

I'm really happy to announce that Károly Négyesi (aka chx) has offered to be my technical mentor in my Season of Usability project on Drupal.  Further Károly also promised to implement the results of the project;  "I am making this program better and bigger by promising that I will code whatever you come up with".

I still haven't been able to establish a technical mentor for my SoU project. I need a Drupal developer with a fair amount of Drupal karma and a small interest in usability, for this project to be successful. I'll be plain; I'm directly asking Dries, core developers, and other similarly-respected folk in the Drupal community, for someone who can commit about 3 hours per week for three months.

I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal.

As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.