usability

A few weeks ago Sutharsan (Erik Stielstra) proposed a kind of dynamic help for Header Image. Together with Bojhan Somers (Bojhan) we developed his idea into a usable way of creating lists with configuration steps for modules (or anything else you'd like to use it for). Last night I created Dynamic Help based on our efforts so far. It's not much code and one might have his doubts as to why I have put this in a separate module.

bertboerland, ximo, al.ex, Jan K, and I tackled the node form. We have results from Minneapolis usability study for Drupal 6 and Baltimore study for vertical tabs.

One of the Szeged UX sprint task were improve the contents and layout of this group. With great help from Drumm and Moshe we managed to base our layout on panels (e.g. superb flexibility) and we are now free to come up with any type of flexible layout for our home.

We are just starting and there are a lot of room for improvements. Please give feedback if this new layout breaks on your browser -- block droppage has been reported -- and what else should be done. Webchick dropped an idea what they are using over SoC: have a special "featured" or "important" tag on content so we could list/sticky important discussions / going-ons automatically.

Also there are some confusion over content types we are using in this group: "Jobs" have not used once -- should we kill it? -- there are some confusion whenever one should create a wiki or discussion on particular issue, this needs clarification.

In related note, Moshe enabled attachments on comments so we can start having a "Photoshop ping-pong" exchanging ideas visually, at least in theory. Does it make wiki pages obsolete? Discuss!

Also, Niels is working on new and improved "quicklinks" panel what you can see in the right. We are about to get rid of outdated and depreciated links there and have logical chunks for the information. It's a wiki page so everybody is welcome to improve and update it later on.

This group made the biggest progress and the patch is already in progress. Here are whiteboard grabs from the review meeting, courtesy of heather.

Making Drupal easier to find, assess and use seem like good fits for the Knight Drupal Initiative.

We all know that there will be a lot of work to do in the redesign, both for theming as well as module development. How about lining up funding for sustained development time and perhaps things like hosted d.o. redesign sprints?

Here is the visual discussion sketch of possible contents and related problems / dependencies of the first-time user help page. We kind-of nailed the contents of the help but it's interaction model, placement and relation with admin, post-install flow etc is still under heavy discussion.

(or how to reduce a module's functionality)

During it's lifetime a contributed module's functionality expands, which often leads to a module packed with features. This growth of features is common for all software, but for Open Source the rate of expansion seems even higher. Feature rich software may be beneficial to the user but it comes at a price. Usability often suffers.

Hi, I posted a lengthy rant on Drupal UI challenges -- sort of an introduction to my thinking and experiences tracking Drupal UI story so far.

http://kika.trip.ee/node/364

Discussion is welcome both here in this thread or over in my site.

I've created a screencast comparing the user experience for entering data via Markdown vs. TinyMCE WYSIWYG:

WYSIWYG vs. HTML Helper Screen Cast at Blip.tv

Hello,

I am a Summer of Code student working on a project called Embed Widgets (http://drupal.org/project/embed_widgets). It allows widgets to be created from Drupal content such as nodes, blocks, or views. Content must first be added as a "widget source" before it can be embedded in a widget. Widgets can be embedded in various formats such as IFrames and Google Gadgets, with more to come.

My project is going great and is nearly complete, but one concern I have is the user interface. I am looking for ways to improve it.