usability

I was going to post an HOWTO as a book page at drupal.org, but I declined, since the parent drop down was so cluttered. Now, there are problems in how someone designed the site, but that's not what I will focus on.

A drop down is a very poor UI unit to use for a large collection of data. It kind of works ok for selecting a country (for Norwegians press O then arrow up, since Oman is the first country in the list after Norway, the last of the Ns), even though there are about 170 countries in those lists.

Webnode understands usability and has excellent interfaces for many common website admin tasks. There are many very well done UI elements here that would work well throughout drupal core and many contrib modules, especially panels, asset, views and many others.

1. Try a demo: http://www.webnode.com/en/demo/
2. Click 'Website Builder' and customize your demo website

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?

FYI: http://drupal.org/node/204667

We're not specifically testing a "library installation," but this represents a first step towards establishing a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship with the Drupal community. With a number of core developers, including Dries, in town, we'll also have a chance to run a few ideas by them regarding a couple of the Drupal-powered scholarly communities that we have begun to construct.

¡Viva la Revolucion!

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".

It's been a while since I first learned about usability testing. As a result, I'm not very aware of good web-based tutorials and resources for beginners. I tend to refer back to Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests, which is kind of a bible in usability circles.

Any of you folks have good tutorials for neophyte testers? Anything on Boxes and Arrows, for example?

Note: the ongoing "official" testing plan document can be found here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/7929

As announced here http://drupal.org/node/204667, Drupal will undergo formal lab usability testing this coming February. This project builds on the already impressive work of the usability group and elsewhere. We feel honored to play a part in this ongoing effort.

The testing process begins with the identification of high-level goals; target audiences; common user tasks for these audiences; and a set of debriefing questions for the evaluators that we recruit for testing (users who test the product are called “evaluators”). It’s critical to the success of this project that we scope the goals, target audiences and tasks appropriately.

The U Libraries testing team has drafted a goal statement, target audience list, task list and proposed a variety of debriefing questions as a preliminary measure towards moving this process forward. We now need the Drupal community to help set priorities; propose and refine tasks; suggest debriefing questions; and to help out with various other tasks.

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.

Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities. We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications.
http://fluidproject.org/

Fluid plans to build its site and UX component/design pattern library in Drupal, and thus might be a valuable collaboration group for folks focused on Drupal UX.

Fluid is funded by the Mellon Foundation.