Usability

Hiya! I've been reading up on this group today, and I've noticed most of the activity is aimed toward improving the administration. That's great, because even after working for two or three months with Drupal, it often still takes me two or three guesses and clicks before I'm finally at the page where I wanted to be - among other small frustrations.

Hello Usability group!

I'm happy to announce that the MiniMenus module is now available. This module has been in use on CivicSpace sites for some time, and I recently got permission to open source it and begin maintaining the module in my free time for the community.
It's been tweaked since last fall with feedback from CivicSpace users, and I've personally grown to depend on it.

We are beginning the process of re-designing Drupal.org. As part of that process, I conducted 10 interviews over email and IRC to help build a survey that will be posted on the Drupal.org homepage. Here is a summary of the Drupal.org interview responses that will be worked into a survey.

Question 1. Describe yourself as a Drupal.org user?

In the Drupal administration survey of 2000 administrators we learned that theming different sections and structures in a site was very important and one of the most difficult parts of administering Drupal.

Earl Miles has put together an important patch, and Dries is rallying folks to review it. Please download head, install this patch and try it out. http://drupal.org/node/130987

Cheers,
Kieran

Hi, there is an effort to re-design Drupal.org and as part of that work I would like to lead some analysis to feed into the re-design.

I am looking for volunteers to conduct Drupal.org user interviews and to help write a survey that would be hosted on Drupal.org and mailed to users.

If you are interested in helping, please join: Drupal.org redesign analyis. I'll approve people who are able to help with these two tasks.

Kieran

(I posted this on the dev list, but I think this is it's proper home.)

Now that we have jQuery in Drupal, there are all sorts of drag-and-drop
interface possibilities.

Questions, too, by the look of http://drupal.org/search/node/drag+and+drop.

I've been working on one for my project, using the interface jQuery plug-in (http://drupal.org/node/101471),
and have a two simple questions:

1) Do we have any best-practice guidelines on using drag-and-drop?

2) Specifically, if the action requires saving the state change, should that

[ Edit ]
To make a long story short, it turns out that robroy was already well ahead of me in figuring out why the old documentation wasn't helping people and will update the documentation next week. Serious props to his chops for the effort.

If you're interested in how this is shaping up, take a look here.

[ / :) ]

The latest UIE tips newsletter (by UIE - User Interface Engineering) has a pointer to an article by Luke Wroblewski, titled "Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization". The article is nearly four years old, and I haven't finished reading it, but from my initial skim, it seems like a good introduction, particularly for programmer types trying to get a handle on visual design issues. For other folks, it will seem like old hat.

The article is at http://www.uie.com/articles/visible_narratives/.

I have no association with UIE, but I find that their newsletter helps me keep usability issues in mind, since it's not my primary job focus.

Drupal administration:

Access control (5)
-permission
-roles
-access rules
--list
--add rule
--check rules
Blocks (3)
-list
--per theme settings
--per block configuration
-add block
Categories (4)
-list
--edit vocabulary list/ per vocabulary
--list terms
--add terms
-add vocabulary
Comments (3)
-list
--publish comments
--approval queue
-configure
Contact form (3)
-categories
--list
--add category
-settings
Forums (4)
-list
-add container
-add forum
-configure
Input formats (2)
-list
-add input format
Logs (2)
-filter by message (all messages, access denied messages, cron messages, first login messages)