Come discuss, create and plan great Drupal UX design
Other places to explore: Core issues tagged 'usability', Where UI docs live, Come chat in IRC in #drupal-usability.
Workflow for engaging designers/themers in core patch reviews?
At Drupalcon Szeged, I had some discussions with the documentation team and the usability team regarding workflow for getting their feedback injected early into the core development process. I'd like to start a similar discussion here with you folks.
Drupal 7 with its code freeze date of "When it's ready" represents a great opportunity for us all to collectively "kick it up a notch." Key to this is involving many more people in the core development process than we normally have. There are always several relatively minor core patches that affect themers in the queue at any given time, such as add $node_classes to node templates, as well as huge, over-arching efforts such as administration theme in core.
But unfortunately, a lot of these patches stagnate and die, because designers have not traditionally been a group of people that we've served particularly well. I'd like to see that changed.
Those little annoying UI things
Share your favourite Drupal User Interface gripe. Big or small.
The buttons and tabs in the sequence of screens when "requesting a new password" have labels that don't reflect what the buttons actually do, and the instructions are incomplete and misleading. Novice Members, especially those who don't have much computer savvy, can be severely flummoxed throughout this process.
- The "Request new password" tab should say something like "Forgot my password." (The "Member" isn't actually going to be given a new password, he/she must eventually change their own password. This is NEVER made clear.)
- The instructions on the following screen should say "Enter your {name of site} Username if you know it. Otherwise, enter the e-mail address where you receive {name of site} 'mass e-mails.' If neither is successful, send an e-mail to webmaster with a brief explanation."
- The "E-mail new password" button on this same screen should say "E-mail password reset instructions." (Again, this is actually what is going to happen. Nobody is emailing you a password.)
- The default text in the email that's sent to the Member needs to say things like "the following link," not "this link," because there are several links in the text. Of course you can edit and improve the text, but the default needs to make more sense.
- The instructions in this email should remind the Member that after clicking on the link, they will have only one opportunity to CHANGE THEIR OWN PASSWORD.
- The screen that the Member sees when returned to the site by the email link needs clearer instructions. (Some of these Members have no idea where they are or what they're doing.) Suggested:
One-time Login (title)
To take advantage of this one-time account access, you must assign yourself a new password. If you log out before completing the steps below, you'll have to repeat the password-recovery procedure that brought you this far.
* Click on the link below to bring up the edit-password page.
* Type your preferred password in the first password field.
* Type it again in the second field to verify.
* Press the "Save" button at the bottom of the page.
If you don't save your entry, the new password will not be registered in the system.
- The button at the bottom of the page should say "Go to the Edit-Password Page," not "Log In." (The confused Member doesn't necessarily even know what Logging in is, much less that this instance is "abnormal."
Top 10 UX improvements for Drupal 7
This is where we will sort out the Master List of ux-issues we want to improve on for Drupal 7.
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UX-process: What goes where?
edit: Carlitus, sorry to hijack your post, but this is an important discussion we'd like to get sorted quickly. Let's try and do this here. - yoroy
The behaviour of the autocomplete when only one term (with one or more words) is needed its very odd: you need to hit the enter two times
Example: the drupal API search
I've found a very similar issue in 2007 http://drupal.org/node/171918
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Dual Interface for Drupal 7 Administration Page
About a dual interface for Drupal 7 administration page? I mean an admin interface that matches both new users’ needs and advance users' needs. Both win. I have posted info & examples here.
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Dynamic Help
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.
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Hardcoding of * for required field
being unable to change the * easily for required fields makes your site 'look' like all the other drupal sites, and can pee you off if you don't want that! ie. if you want to change it to '(needed)', or whatever etc to suit your audience (older users of a site won't be trained to know what * means), so i think it should be translated to allow the drupal admin to get to it.
Read morepreview on left, submit on right? who knows?
in some places around drupal, ,the submit is on the left, and preview on the right, and are completely reversed in others. can this be standardised please.
also, when the enter key is pressed, should the default action be to post, not preview. as enter is normally a substitute for pressing submit in most forms, why break it?
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Prevent users from navigating away from unsaved data?
Please give you feedback on this proposed change:
http://drupal.org/node/193799 => Warn before losing changes (e.g.: blocks and menu admin pages)
Read morefirst time experiences & thoughts
hi everyone, i wanted to post up some thoughts and ideas that i found confusing from when i first started with drupal. this is mostly based on 5 experiences. i know 6 has come a long way from 5, but i don't really have that much experience of 6 yet, so sorry if some of this doesn't apply. so, in no particular order
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UX sprint group 4 (The long node/add form) progress
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.
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Working on new usability group layout and content
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.
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new categorization of all usability "stuff" (handbook, issue list, discussions)
kika made a diagram of the current information and information streams we have on usability, which were quite fragmented. I mindmapped a new way to divide that information so we'd have places for:
People who want to help Drupal Usability
One place for discussions
One place for issues
Compose a guide on 'User Interface best practices'
The following people will set up this guide: Sutharsan, Gaele, Yngve
Tasks:
- Collect existing best practices (d.o, presentations, the web)
- Compose preliminary guide in this wiki
- Create guide as handbook page
Tasklist for UX sprint in Szeged
We have 15+ 5+ people working on UX improvements in Szeged under the umbrella of Code Sprint. Below are tasks we came up with and synced with Webchick.
Funding Usability and d.o. Redesign Work
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?
Read moreScreencasts from other CMSes
In Szeged Usability Sprint I started an initiative to collect best practices from the other CMSes. As videos are quickest and most effective way to give overview of the flows and functionality, I picked to use screencasts for that.
Habari:
http://habariproject.org/
Screencast of the installation and site setup: MOV (20 mb)
Add more to the comments and lets take it from there.
Read moreUX sprint group 1 (dissapearing help) progress
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.
Read moreUX Sprint
These are the groups we formed.
- help
- lost content
- parent items
- long form
sutharsan, gaele, noyz, elv, kika, nestor
catch, eigentor, kika, JBI
roel G, Natbof?, AlexUA, imre (Byelex), kulcsi
(__This group dispanded shortly after because of language / communication barriers. No parent items UX this time__)
Dries, Alex, Jan, ximo, drumm
