Usability

Continuing discussion from http://groups.drupal.org/node/11011

I have exchanged a number of emails with a reseller of Morae in Australia (they cover sales in my geographic region). They say there are no academic or non-profit discount on Morae. I didn't ask about bulk-purchase. It would be interesting to see if Techsmith (or their US reseller) also says this. Prices they quoted were in AUD and approximately equivalent of those published in USD on http://www.techsmith.com/purchase/default.asp

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

I just posted my outline and UI design for a new image gallery module to Drupal on the Raincity Studios blog. It uses CCK, imagefield, and imagecache, and has both galleries and images as nodes.

I'm looking for feedback on the idea, and to see if people are interested in having this built, either through a reverse bounty or some other method.

UPDATE:

some projects following this slides are now existing, see here :

So, for GSoC, my project is, for lack of a better name, Plugin Manager.

It's designed to retrieve a list of all modules and themes available for the version of Drupal that a server is using. It then allows the Drupal administrator to automatically retrieve and install the modules and themes they desire (as well as their dependencies). Just to be perfectly honest, the group that I want to cater to the most is the group that wants a website and has no idea what tar.gz means.

I've come up against a usability problem that I think is caused by a problem in Drupal's data model.

Example of problem: When setting block visibility settings, it is impossible (without writing custom php), to make a block visible to authenticated users who have no other role, if you don't want that block to show to all authenticated users. In other words, you may want to show the block to all authenticated users except those of belonging to role x. No can do without php.

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.