usability

You might remember we mentioned that we were going to kick off an activity we call 'Pimp Your Admin' at the recent Drupalcon conference - we have a few interesting screencasts already and now we'd like to invite you to join in!

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can bend it to your will - get it to do just about anything you need it to do. Same goes for it’s administration interface (admin).

There is a discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/19171 regarding revamping the administrative menu. It seems to me that the issue of the improving the menu INTERFACE is different than the issue of STRUCTURE. Here, I'd like to see if we can gather the discussion of practical alternative menu interfaces for core. As I mentioned in the aforementioned thread, please let me know if I'm duplicating efforts here.

I figured my first attempt at a custom and hopefully contributed module should be something that is simple and usable, while a little bit challenging.

I love the simplicity of the FAPI collapsible fieldset but I was disappointed that it didn't remember whether I wanted it to be collapsed or open. So this is my attempt at fixing that problem.

From The American Foundation of the Blind (AFB):

• A Review of the Accessibility of Facebook
• Survey on Social Networking Sites

You may have heard the excellent and very exciting news that following on from our work on Drupal.org, Mark Boulton Design has been contracted to take a look at the User Experience for the upcoming Drupal 7, and I'm very happy to be working with him on this project as well.

Has anyone come up with a better way of presenting the list of tokens to users? I'm finding that what I'm doing is really ugly and would love to know if anyone has seen any good examples of how to present tokens in a more usable manner.

I haven't seen any discussion about Book usability on here yet it's one of the highlighted topics for things that need to be patched in Drupal 7 usability. Does anyone have any thoughts on how Books can be improved. I have a whole module dedicated towards Book usability improvements and while the project as a whole I'm sure implements a bit too much to be rolled into core, it does have a lot of features which make using books in Drupal faster and MUCH more user-friendly thanks to outline designer, thickbox, prepopulate and the ajax modules.

WebAIM has just published the initial results of its January 2009 survey of people who use screen readers and other forms of assistive technology (AT). Find the WebAIM survey's initial results here.

I have barely looked at this information, but a few points do jump out at me:

As you might know, we will be spending a week at the University of Baltimore doing a usability test (http://www.bojhan.nl/usability-testing-at-university-of-baltimore/). We intend to focus this study more on solving the problems that have previously been identified by testing at the UMN and UB.

We've been discussing the need for unique strings of text for unique links in the new WCAG 2.0 standards. But Cliff brought up that there are some SEO issues involved in this as well. So how do we get more meaningful links coming from our list/view pages so that instead of having 100 links pointing to your page say "Read more" and we have more using a related string, like "Accessible Themes for Drupal".