usability

It's very important that DrupalMU ships with a WYSIWYG. If we want to make things as easy as possible, this would mean that using TinyMCE or FCKeditor is out of the question: we can't have our user download an extra package from an external site, put it in a specific location and then do some more configuration.

Update I think I found a perfect candidate for a WYSIWYG shipping with DrupalMU: BUEditor (thanks Michelle!). It requires no extra libraries to be installed, has a teaser break and it integrates with IMCE!

There are a few issues in GHOP on usability and a several for user interface. Most of the user interface issues are already claimed, but none of the usability ones have any interest yet. I wonder if they are just newer if kids aren't interested in usability, or if the tasks are too vague.

How can we promote usability in the programme? With youths?

Chris Messina's (aka Factory Joe) review of drupal 6 is a big contribution to drupal usability. I have highlighted about 50 actionable issues that have been raised and/or discussed through this review. Most of them are trivial changes for drupal 6, but are key usability improvements. Many are simply improving the help text. Some are larger tasks that require more work and changes and should probably wait for drupal 7.

UI-Patterns.com is a great resource for information architects, UX designers, UI specialists, but most of all, for developers!

How can something like this be made more useful and usable by developers of both drupal core and contrib? I would like to see usability start at drupal's roots, rather than being left for an after-thought. (This too-often results in interfaces that are harder to fix than they would have been to get right the first time).

Web Application Form Design
http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/web_forms.html

Web Form Design in the Wild, Part I
http://www.uie.com/articles/forms-fairmont-hotel/

Web Form Design in the Wild, Part 2
http://www.uie.com/articles/form_design_wild/

Lately I've been scouring the User Experience issue queue. I've triaged a lot of issues out to more appropriate projects. If I've done so in error, I'm sorry.

After I panned out a lot of obvious issues. I've found some genuinely interesting suggestions. I would like to welcome everyone to come visit the issue queue for a few minutes and take a look around at the issues.

LINK: http://drupal.org/project/issues/user_experience

Hello Usability group!

I'm happy to announce that the MiniMenus module is now available. This module has been in use on CivicSpace sites for some time, and I recently got permission to open source it and begin maintaining the module in my free time for the community.
It's been tweaked since last fall with feedback from CivicSpace users, and I've personally grown to depend on it.

My specific query is how to set about initialising the creation of a node through the use of a click on a Gmaps module generated map, but perhaps this highlights some wider issues about usability. I can see a metric shed-load of impressive work - flamboyant hat tip to webgeer, geodan; with the proposed Mapping API DEP etc - going into the backend on creating and expanding geo-functionality in Drupal, but not so much on the usability side.

(I posted this on the dev list, but I think this is it's proper home.)

Now that we have jQuery in Drupal, there are all sorts of drag-and-drop
interface possibilities.

Questions, too, by the look of http://drupal.org/search/node/drag+and+drop.

I've been working on one for my project, using the interface jQuery plug-in (http://drupal.org/node/101471),
and have a two simple questions:

1) Do we have any best-practice guidelines on using drag-and-drop?

2) Specifically, if the action requires saving the state change, should that