Usability

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!

This post is my comments on various Drupal usability matters I spotted during Bay Area Drupal Camp 2010 (BADCamp) presentations, as inspired by jenlampton's talk WordPress is better than Drupal, developers take note.

I've created a demo to show how Drupal and Sencha Touch can work together. The demo is called "Tea Sencha Network" and it displays information from Sencha's official blog.

Please access:

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Greetings, Usability Team!

Just wanted to raise to your attention that Google is sponsoring a program to help 13-18 year olds get involved in open source called Google Code-In:http://code.google.com/opensource/gci/2010-11/index.html. The program runs Nov. 22 - January 10, and the past incarnation (GHOP) netted us rockstars such as Jimmy Berry (who wrote the infrastructure for our automated testing bot), Daniel Wehner (who is now a Views co-maintainer), and Charlie Gordon (who has done a bunch of work in core on SimpleTest and D7UX patches).

Topics about the usability of Drupal remind me on the most recent Steve Jobs' speech against Android and Open Source community over iOS and integrated solutions: http://tinyurl.com/steve-jobs-vs-android

I don't know how many of you guys will read this and find it interesting, but I think this is a pretty good question on usability. Steve Jobs labelled here the Open Source solutions as "Fragmented" (which is fairly true), and claims it will clearly lose battle against "Integrated" solutions (which is an argument I hear quite frequently lately in many different forms).

eoriordan says:

I have been thinking of the next step here and the best way to get a bit of momentum behind this again. For me the next step is to begin to create resources based on the personas. What do people think? I think in someways there is so much stuff that we could do that it can be a little overwhelming.

Effective onboarding is an important key to helping new users to a website get integrated. A great deal of time and money is spent by major social networking sites to optimize their onboarding process.

I'm proposing that we build something similar for Drupal. The module would provide a number of configurable forms common to onboarding flows and handle pulling new users through the flow.

A short list of forms I'm planning on adding include:
* Fill out essential info for their profile
* Upload a picture
* Join groups
* Follow people

I have been building a site that was designed by a very ambitious designer. One of the features she wants is to have two different 'types' of pages, one with a right sidebar, and one without.

In my mind, this wants to be within the same theme, instead of creating a sidebar and a full-width theme.

The problem is how to create this.

One idea I have had is to add a vocabulary that contains terms that can be used to determine the layout. Then use a phptemplate_preprocess_page() function to detect the taxonomy of a given node, then unset the variables accordingly.

I spent some time reviewing UI design work on Views 3 (And Acquia Gardens "Data pages") UI concepts:

• "Views 3 UX Season is open", February 2010, Yoroy
• "Views 3 UX workflows and ideas, round 1", April 2010, Rasskull
• "View3 UI explorations, part 2", July 2010, Yoroy
• Acquia Gardens "Data Page" concept mockups, Jeff Noyes?
• "More Views 3 concepts", July 2010, Jeff Noyes

NOTE: I have not read all of (or even very much of) the related discussion, so am likely missing important developments.

There are some great "sky-high" ideas in most of these. However I think it's likely that all of them will run into issues as or more significant than the current UI, in that either;

• They will be be too restrictive upon advanced functionality and features and make them difficult or hacky to include in the (in the case of Gardens, that is likely intentional, as advanced features are probably not supported);
• They will have similar types of unforeseen issues to the current UI. Subtle and seemingly minor nuances or even features that actually make a big impact on the UX.