usability

I'm hoping to find a company in the Boulder/Denver area that can help us with website usability testing. Wondering if the group can send me some referrals.

Usability Findings

How is it to create a new content type or edit an existing content type?

Background:

Note: The issues listed here are not added to the issue queue yet. The intent is to discuss them before we put it there

As most of you are aware that we completed a successful round of usability testing with 8 participants new to Drupal at the University of Minnesota in May 2011. Yayy! Thank YOU everyone involved in making this work. I was pleased to see the attention this study is getting on the issue queue (tagged with “UMN 2011”) and at various conferences including DCL. But this is just uncovering the tip of the iceberg, a lot more needs to be tested and be reported to the community. As a part of this, I plan to explore various avenues to conduct more studies.

A big part of any user experience is usability. It's the first step toward an engaging and seamless experience.

There are three key areas that will be the focus of the formal mobile usability tests:

1. Navigation
2. Readability
3. User Input

Currently Drupal's admin interface fails one and two almost instantly on small and touch screens. All three need a wide range of tests before we can confidently address these issues. I'd like it if people could weigh in based on previous experience.

I'll be posting more about the usability tests soon.

Hi folks --

At Drupalcon I mentioned we are doing a full-scale usability and accessibility of our redesigned website (under development at http://www.drupal-dev.naric.com/drupal-7.0/) Attached is brief, preliminary review of our development site. The Paciello Group reviewed three templates and a handful of pages for us. I'm still going through and making changes based on their recommendations. Some are more challenging for me than others. CSS I can fix. PHP, not so much. For example:
-Accessibility of the Feedback module
-"more" link in the aggregator feed (needs context)

After months of tinkering with our Drupal distro and the custom theme to go with it, I finally got a chance this weekend to run a user test. The subject, Diana is not computer savvy. For example, a link or button has to look click-able (shouldn't it always!) for her to click it. When I asked her to create a blog post, she clicked the blog navigation link and wondered why there was no form for her to complete. She did not immediately see the "Create content" link. Diana uses a Mac and admits she is right brain dominant.

As we are getting ready to plan things for UMN testing, I am excited and throwing some irons in the fire. As we all know there are plenty of things that need to be ironed out like - what do we test? how many participants do we need? how much are we compensating them? how long should the sessions be? whom should we test - new users or experts or both? Oh, well ! For such and many more questions, we have the meeting next time :) But just to get things started I would like to share what we could possibly test. The intent of this post is to solicit ideas and suggestions and start a conversation.

In the Why don't D.O. and G.D.O. use a wysiwyg editor? thread, I suggested it might be good to start a discussion on specifications for a coherant and integrated WYSIWYG user experience in Drupal. This naturally starts at a distance from the priorities of developers, but it's my hope that it's still useful for discuss the issue from the perspective of end-users and site-builders.

Hi All,

I am considering to present a talk on open source and usability. Since the scope of this is too broad, I am focusing on the BIG CONCERNS of open source (especially Drupal) with respect to usability and user experience and the ways we intend to tackle them. I am particularly interested in getting YOUR reactions to this as it provides me with a fresh perspective on things.

Thank you!

Anyone have any good usability resources? Ideally, I'd like to take a course to brush up on my skills but any information would do!