Usability

hi there!

I am trying to find out the best way to connect a sencha touch application to a drupal 7 backend. couls anybody tell about a good tutorial or screencast for that problem?
my biggest issue is

a) to make drupal send some JSON data out of views
b) to connect a sencha store to this JSON stream.

any help would be great!
thnx!

I am writing this post to introduce myself and to invite both developers and UX designers to discuss a concept that I think is central to UX systems design - that of the User Narrative.

I am a UX designer and software developer with over 20 years of experience in the commercial software industry. Over the last 4 years I have shifted my focus from desktop to web applications. The last 3 years have been almost entirely spent on learning the ins and outs of building web sites on the Drupal platform.

Hi All,

I am considering to present a talk on open source and usability. Since the scope of this is too broad, I am focusing on the BIG CONCERNS of open source (especially Drupal) with respect to usability and user experience and the ways we intend to tackle them. I am particularly interested in getting YOUR reactions to this as it provides me with a fresh perspective on things.

Thank you!

This module will provide an API and a UI for immediate inline validation or other checking and responding of form elements. (Contrast this with AJAX module, which validates the entire form via AJAX when the submit or preview button is pressed.)

The ideal will be to automate using (or make it very simple to use) existing form element validation functions as the back-end of inline validators.

The initial motivation was to extend (and make an honest module out of) Unique Fields AJAX checking, but the number of nice-to-haves and ought-to-bes make point the way to a new API for setting message conditions and messages. This will be developed API-first.

Notes from my due diligence are here: http://data.agaric.com/raw/ajax-form-messages-proposed-module

This post is my comments on various Drupal usability matters I spotted during Bay Area Drupal Camp 2010 (BADCamp) presentations, as inspired by jenlampton's talk WordPress is better than Drupal, developers take note.

Core issue: http://drupal.org/node/953314

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Ready and able to drive your most demanding projects with ease. Built for both high-end performance and ease of use.

After two and a half years of development by over 1,000 contributors, we proudly present Drupal 7: the best version of Drupal yet.

[Download link]

Easy to use

I've created a demo to show how Drupal and Sencha Touch can work together. The demo is called "Tea Sencha Network" and it displays information from Sencha's official blog.

Please access:

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In a recent issue, [#936926-62: Update color scheme for status-based issue tables and issue link filter], the question of allowing users the option to customize UI preferences was raised. This is not the first time that this question has come up. In fact in Drupal 7 we have at least two UI options for accessibility, the ability to show row weights on table drag, and the ability to disable the Overlay.

Greetings, Usability Team!

Just wanted to raise to your attention that Google is sponsoring a program to help 13-18 year olds get involved in open source called Google Code-In:http://code.google.com/opensource/gci/2010-11/index.html. The program runs Nov. 22 - January 10, and the past incarnation (GHOP) netted us rockstars such as Jimmy Berry (who wrote the infrastructure for our automated testing bot), Daniel Wehner (who is now a Views co-maintainer), and Charlie Gordon (who has done a bunch of work in core on SimpleTest and D7UX patches).

Hi All,

I am trying to come up with a listing of Drupal 7 tasks by end users than we can test for accessibility. I have included some tasks below to get the ball rolling, feel free to add your tasks. I'm not sure if this was done already, but the plan is to come up with some tasks, and then test them against actual users with disabilities and see what improvements can be made.

The tasks are:

• Creating a user account
• Requesting a new password
• Changing your password
• Posting a comment

Topics about the usability of Drupal remind me on the most recent Steve Jobs' speech against Android and Open Source community over iOS and integrated solutions: http://tinyurl.com/steve-jobs-vs-android

I don't know how many of you guys will read this and find it interesting, but I think this is a pretty good question on usability. Steve Jobs labelled here the Open Source solutions as "Fragmented" (which is fairly true), and claims it will clearly lose battle against "Integrated" solutions (which is an argument I hear quite frequently lately in many different forms).

These usability resources are suggestions based on four user personas. The resources can be discussed here.

eoriordan says:

I have been thinking of the next step here and the best way to get a bit of momentum behind this again. For me the next step is to begin to create resources based on the personas. What do people think? I think in someways there is so much stuff that we could do that it can be a little overwhelming.

Hello, we are actively doing QA testing and a number of design issues have arisen. We have dedicated implementation resources, and themers who are helping but we need help translating design issues into actionable improvements. This is the beginning of ongoing design improvements that we will be constantly deploying on Drupal.org.

Effective onboarding is an important key to helping new users to a website get integrated. A great deal of time and money is spent by major social networking sites to optimize their onboarding process.

I'm proposing that we build something similar for Drupal. The module would provide a number of configurable forms common to onboarding flows and handle pulling new users through the flow.

A short list of forms I'm planning on adding include:
* Fill out essential info for their profile
* Upload a picture
* Join groups
* Follow people

Hello,

I'm working on developing a "simple mode" API for Drupal which will allow site builders to switch between simple and advance user interface or otherwise hide advance features.

I have been building a site that was designed by a very ambitious designer. One of the features she wants is to have two different 'types' of pages, one with a right sidebar, and one without.

In my mind, this wants to be within the same theme, instead of creating a sidebar and a full-width theme.

The problem is how to create this.

One idea I have had is to add a vocabulary that contains terms that can be used to determine the layout. Then use a phptemplate_preprocess_page() function to detect the taxonomy of a given node, then unset the variables accordingly.

Our designers at Torchbox came up with a persona aggregated from "designers they have known" that might be useful to the Four Personas project. At this late stage it could be extra baggage, but people might find it useful as it's "original research", even if it is anecdotal. We could either have it as a fifth or integrate bits of it into e.g. Sarah, the existing persona: it has a lot of overlap with her, although Rob is a bit older.

I spent some time reviewing UI design work on Views 3 (And Acquia Gardens "Data pages") UI concepts:

• "Views 3 UX Season is open", February 2010, Yoroy
• "Views 3 UX workflows and ideas, round 1", April 2010, Rasskull
• "View3 UI explorations, part 2", July 2010, Yoroy
• Acquia Gardens "Data Page" concept mockups, Jeff Noyes?
• "More Views 3 concepts", July 2010, Jeff Noyes

NOTE: I have not read all of (or even very much of) the related discussion, so am likely missing important developments.

There are some great "sky-high" ideas in most of these. However I think it's likely that all of them will run into issues as or more significant than the current UI, in that either;

• They will be be too restrictive upon advanced functionality and features and make them difficult or hacky to include in the (in the case of Gardens, that is likely intentional, as advanced features are probably not supported);
• They will have similar types of unforeseen issues to the current UI. Subtle and seemingly minor nuances or even features that actually make a big impact on the UX.

At the recent & awesome DrupalCon Copenhagen we had two Birds of a Feather meetings regarding what can be done to involve more designers in the Drupal project.
Discussion can be found here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/90274