I met with Thomas at Drupalcon Denver to talk a bit about how to get more people excited about and involved with improving the user experience of the Media module(s). Here's a very rough first draft of what we came up with:
Goal
Get more people excited about improving the Media module UX.
Strategy
- Make it easier
- Make it fun
- Make it worthwhile
Make it easier
Demo sites. If we want to involve more non-technical people (we do!) and get them contributing back, we have to provide demo sites. Installing core, media, configuring things to get it to look somewhat like a typical site is too much to ask if we are looking for feedback on the user interface, how it works and how it looks. And there's a lot to be gained from getting this feedback.
Make it fun
- Remove the barriers, see make it easy above :)
- Show people the power of open source collaboration
- This Stuff Is Important
- Davereid cat pictures…
Make it worth your while
- Recognize people for their contributions (status update blog posts, thank you's)
- Try to make sure people are working on the right things (scope, direction, viability) to avoid spending energy on the wrong things
- …
What we think we need
- User stories/task scenarios for editor tasks and site builder tasks, so that we know what we want to test for
- These user stories could also help prioritize development: what do people need most?
- Clear guide on how to do quick, lo-fi, high-value usability testing and reporting back (see: http://drupal.org/ui-standards)
- Kick off a review of just the user interface texts for inconsistency, too difficult, not task-driven, too long descriptions etc. (see: http://drupal.org/node/604342)
- Demo site!
Comments
Demo site
Yoroy and I briefly chatted about Media UX work tonight. About the demo site: this could be based on http://drupal.org/project/media_dev. If we clean that up (ie. use stable releases, get all the modules up to date, ...) we could use a 'stable Media install profile' to run the demo site (and people could use the profile to get going with Media site building as well). We could even go as far as resetting the demo site, say, every 24h, by doing a re-install with drush.
MSS Feature
That's a great idea to use the media_dev profile for.
I've been working on a simple feature, http://drupal.org/sandbox/tsvenson/1428994, to get Media quickly running and fully configured. My next step was to take on the media_dev profile.
By having the profile itself pretty basic, we can then use features to populate it with the functionality/structure it needs for various tasks we want to use it for.
--
/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com
Yup, good idea. The one thing
Yup, good idea. The one thing I'll repeat here is that we want to start with a couple of user tasks to do light-weight usability testing for. I'm hoping the test plan that @jerryitt is working on will have those :)
Last week there was a
Last week there was a pre-SXSW Community Media Drupal Summit for stations using Drupal 7 and CiviCRM. While these groups have been driving the media related work I've been doing w/ media_feeds and media_derivatives, we've only recently started bundling those configuration up into Feature driven modules like...
http://drupal.org/project/cm_vod_feed
And we've only just started defining what would go into 3 different starter kit install profiles...
http://groups.drupal.org/node/214333
My 2¢ is not to try to use media_dev for both development testing and a starter kit to help users, but to rename the feature @tsvenson has been working on to media_easy or something like that and keep these projects separate.
The Community Media starter kits will have a lot of the same modules and pre-configured Features as what you are discussing here, but they are going to remain very focussed on this niche community of Drupal users.
Indeed, I was very much
Indeed, I was very much thinking of keeping both things (media_dev and media_easy, be it a feature or an install profile) separate.
Looking forward to seeing @jerryitt's notes/plan!
How much of this is obsolete
The designs are several months old, but they capture the basic needs of any media management interface. At one point, these were the driving interfaces behind media.
I'd like to help out, but I need to know what of these designs needs to be updated.
http://drupal.org/node/865006