usability

glad to start of the discussion here. :)

Recently there has been a lot of talk about usability problems. I think the solution to this also lies in a better help system.

Drupal is not a trivial piece of software, that we can make a interface and expect the users to understand everything about it. So lets face the problem.

I'm a GSoC student for 2008. My project is Usability Testing Suite and I have created a flow for how I think it should work and would like feedback as to the viability of it.

Please comment on the issue, not this discussion.

Thanks.

Project schedule and status: http://groups.drupal.org/node/11011

Still not sure why usability testing is important? See what a linux hobbyist found in an informal usability test on Ubuntu.

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

[Continue reading on my blog at CivicActions: civicactions.com/blog/scaling_up_usability_testing_in_drupal]

There have been a few rounds of discussions on Drupal UX goals/principles this past year, so I thought this announcement would be of interest to the community:

"Late in 2007, our User Experience (UX) group—which does user interface design, visual design, user research, web development, and user interface writing—set out to articulate the principles that ought to guide Google designs worldwide. What are the fundamentals that all Google designers and researchers accept? Which approaches to design are particularly "Googley"? How can we encourage teams throughout Google to dream big and make smart design decisions?"

It doesn't seem to make sense to me that the collapsable areas on the modules page are open by default?

If you have lots of modules installed then you spend most of your time closing sections or just using the browsers find feature to find what you need.

On that same note it would be nice (don't know of it does this already) if you could organize modules in folders on your server and have them show up as a collapsable area. for example I could put all my SEO modules in a folder and have a SEO collapsable section.

just a thought.

Why are the "Administration Theme" settings are located in "Administer -> Site Configuration" area, rather than with all of the other theme settings in "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes".

The only unique configuration option that is in the "Administration Theme" menu is the "Use admin. theme for content editing" checkbox -- and this could simply be moved to the bottom of the list of themes in the "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes" menu. It seems unnecessary for this single option to have it's own section in the administration menu.

Is there a way to automatically wrap all "translated" text with html tags? For example, the font for dz (Dzongkha/Tibetan) is really quite small compared to western fonts due to the possible height of characters in the language. It would be very useful to take any text and wrap it with tags so that I could then institute text formatting with a stylesheet, while not disturbing and western text that may be untranslated.

The basic notion is to extend the current Node Hierarchy module functionality.

The finalized report documents just came in:

• Summary Report
• Issues Identification Matrix
• Issues Identification Matrix - Reordered

It might be obvious to some of you, but to me it certainly wasn't, so I thought a short link might be a good idea as most of you probably don't lurk around on Planet KDE or Planet Ubuntu. Do read usability professional Celeste Paul's refreshing realization:

• The #1 Problem in OSS Usability and What I'm Going to Do About It
• Short follow-up: Leadership is a problem but not the problem