usability

Hello everyone.

I'd like to invite you to use UCDmanager. It's a personal project that allows to manage different usability techniques:

UCDmanager http://ucdmanager.net

I think it may be interesting to this group because it's based on Drupal, and because it allows to perform usability techniques in a collaborative way, that is very important in open-source developments. You could use it, for instance, to planificate, perform and communicate the results of usability evaluations of Drupal core or modules.

I've in the middle of a series of 6 posts presenting my views and ideas on how to make the Drupal Learning Curve less steep by better understanding and improving the site builder experience.

Its my opinion that by doing so it will also make it much more easy to not only build sites with better usability/UX for users, but also sites that are easier to maintain and expand with new features.

On Thursday, March 22, 2012, @lisarex and I ran a BoF to talk about Usability. First of all, we would like to thank every one who could make it to the session. For the others who could not make it, here is the summary from the session.

Since the group was a mix of new and existing contributors, the focus was on what we “the usability team” could do to make things better for the community.

Hi all!

I'm new to the Drupal UX community, but not new to Drupal or User Experience Design. (I've added some info to my drupal.org profile for those interested in reading more...) I just finished speaking with yoroy about diving into Drupal UX work and the topic of Account Management came up. I mentioned how much it annoyed me and, lo and behold, it turns out that it's a pretty common pain point around here. So, I thought I'd kickoff my inaugural journey into doing UX with the Drupal Community with a discussion about Drupal's Sign In, Registration, and Account Management interactions.

Hello All,

I plan to conduct a usability study with new users to understand how they get oriented and use Drupal for the very first time. I know some of you had concerns about usability testing being favored toward the new users and not the existing ones. We have studies in mind for them as well :) It is just a matter of time and project management.

Here is a rough rough draft of the study. I would be very much interested in your feedback. Based of the feedback, I will go ahead and create a more robust screener and moderator's guide.

Hello All,

Over the last few weeks, we have come up with a list of important tasks that we deemed important for the module redesign. However, we would like to test those with our users. So, we are going to conduct interviews and understand how they use the module page.
Following is the guide we intend to use to do the interviews:

Research module page

Goals

As the members of the “Usability” group, we all know that resources to conduct usability studies are limited. For getting more data and conducting more studies, I am thinking we could collaborate with Bentley University, Massachussetts, USA for a usability study.

Details:

During the accessibility BoF at Drupalcon London several people showed interest in resuming the monthly conference calls that we have had in the past.

I would be happy to participate in these calls, and think we should get started. There are several initiatives that require some attention, primarily:

1. html5 accessibility (including WAI-ARIA in Core)
2. WYSIWYG in Core
3. Further triage and patches for open accessibility issues
4. ...

I'm hoping that someone will volunteer to organize these calls so that we can:

In order to be more efficient in our approach in identifying issues, we have created a simple google spreadsheet. The intent is for everyone in the community to be able to log issues easily. Over the period of time we will be able to prioritize and solve these usability issues.

I hear you guys, this is a very 1.0 way of doing it, but at least it is a start! right?

So when you get annoyed with something, make a difference, log the issue.

Here is the google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/a/acquia.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai6zQDgsPhvldH...

DrupalCon is approaching! Excited?

I am thinking of leveraging this opportunity and get some data. We could of course do usability testing! But instead I think, I would be better to do user research because:
- Usability Testing can be done remotely
- We are getting usability testing data (slowly but, yes!)
- We don't have any user research data
- User research data will greatly help the design process + plus many other obvious advantages

RESEARCH AT DCL:
What I plan to do research on?