usability

I'm a web developer who has been working with Drupal for the last 12 months. I work for an interactive design agency based in central London, our resources include a fully specced usability Lab. The lab includes 2 way glass and real-time video monitoring and recording using Morae (software). I'm keen to become active in the Drupal Usability group and would be happy to conduct some usability tests.

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As some of you know, I've recently taken over maintenance of Inline and Image Assist, and initiated the Wysiwyg project. That was not only caused by personal interest, but also to take the necessary steps to realize the long awaited Inline API. You might ask yourself, what those three modules have in common or to do with each other at all: They deal with user input, allow to embed complex contents into a content, and provide an interactive GUI for that. If you already had the chance to work with them, you already know that there is a rather hidden, non-obvious hard-dependency between them.

Although I'd really like to discuss both topics (Inline and Wysiwyg support) separately, the gained experience on these topics enforces us to discuss them concurrently. The following mockup hopefully explains why: (see attachment to view in full size)

Recently, a GHOP student asked me for some help in dealing with usability issues in drupal contrib and wanted to know about resources for learning usability. Here I've published my response for others' benefit too:

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Hi,

I consider myself a usability student. I'm definitely not a usability expert -- although I have a strong interest in it and I pursue that interest aside from my paid work, mostly through drupal. Anyway, here are my thoughts;

Like many things in life, I think usability is one of those things many people just 'get' naturally. I call this 'usability sense'. It's also possible to 'learn' usability and improve usability sense, knowledge and understanding through practice, literature and other resources.

In this way 'learning usability' is a lot like learning to play music. Many people 'get' music straight away. They learn the tools (their musical instruments) and then they're away.

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 have created a series of four usability testing tasks in the GHOP programme. Each one tests a different area of Drupal:

• Installation (Claimed)
• Admin (Claimed)
• Node add and edit (Open)
• Anonymous Browsing (Open)

We have been thinking and working quite a lot on node add/edit forms. There was bit of an Agreement to solve the problem of the overlong form by splitting it into tabs http://drupal.org/node/185814

Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design"

These rules were obtained from the text Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman. Shneiderman proposed this collection of principles that are derived heuristically from experience and applicable in most interactive systems after being properly refined, extended, and interpreted.
To improve the usability of an application it is important to have a well designed interface. Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" are a guide to good interaction design.

1 Strive for consistency.

There seems to be a lot of great work on usability in admin going into this admin theme called RootCandy:

It sounds like it's still pretty unstable but worth watching nonetheless.

The author created this wiki page: http://groups.drupal.org/node/8247

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.

See preview attached, the FUTURE ajaxy image field module that we should create.

Functionality :

• Ajax upload, like the upload module, no need to reload the page
• possibility to choose a FEATURED image, to select which image should be displayed when in a teaser.

• like image field, possibility to change alt text and title.

  add a CAPTION FIELD ??

• possibility to re-arrange the order of the images by clicking on the UP and DOWN arrows.

  Maybe even better with a DRAG AND DROP interface to re-arrange the order of the image !