Usability

Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities. We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications.
http://fluidproject.org/

Fluid plans to build its site and UX component/design pattern library in Drupal, and thus might be a valuable collaboration group for folks focused on Drupal UX.

Fluid is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

I recruited a 13-year old kid to claim a GHOP project. "Recruited" is an exaggeration, I just sent him a brief e-mail and he did the rest on his own. He was mentored by webchick who gave him great feedback.

He did a usability study and came up with a few interesting observations. He has posted issues on all of them.

The study that he did was on setting up a Drupal sight from scratch.

I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal.

As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.

There are a few issues in GHOP on usability and a several for user interface. Most of the user interface issues are already claimed, but none of the usability ones have any interest yet. I wonder if they are just newer if kids aren't interested in usability, or if the tasks are too vague.

How can we promote usability in the programme? With youths?

UI-Patterns.com is a great resource for information architects, UX designers, UI specialists, but most of all, for developers!

How can something like this be made more useful and usable by developers of both drupal core and contrib? I would like to see usability start at drupal's roots, rather than being left for an after-thought. (This too-often results in interfaces that are harder to fix than they would have been to get right the first time).

Not exactly related to Drupal, but this is a quite interesting article about Firefox 3.

The article is about design, UI, usability of course, but also about how they affect the perception of the brand. It's nice to read about the reasoning behind the forthcoming changes, and could be an inspiration to us when we think about possible changes in Drupal's UI.

This is just a small step towards making forms more usable. I've made a block to toggle the display of field descriptions (the tiny help texts below input fields). The idea is that once you've read them you don't need them anymore, so they just as well could go away. Still it should be easy to get them back instantly, in case you forgot what a field was about.

Please go to http://demo.guruburu.com and check it out. Create an account and try "My account" and "Create content". And tell me below what you think.