Usability

At the recent & awesome DrupalCon Copenhagan we had two Birds of a Feather meetings (where like minded people meet to have an an informal discuss) regarding what can be done to involve more designers in the Drupal project.

To help aid these discussions we started from the very beginning and created 4 personas. There personas were intended to represent the various types of people who are potentially frustrated with the state of design in Drupal.

Hagen Graf did an excellent live usability test at the unconference immediately before DrupalCon Copenhagen. He's a a tech writer well versed in all three of Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal, so he was able to draw out the strength and weaknesses of getting started with each platform.

Community products usable out of the box : How is Drupal able to "compete"?
BrainStorming session Monday 3:00 to 4:00 pm Copenhagen time, Register at http://groups.drupal.org/node/88459)

Drupal has now at least two community products usable out of the box. http://commons.acquia.com & http://openatrium.com
(Edit 20100822) http://drupal.org/project/voicebox targeting targets community media
+ facebook like feature http://sndemo.dev3.webenabled.net/node/1

There is a need to see how those projects compare and are able to "compete" with non-Drupal products.

Apologies in advance for this crossposting to 11 groups. I recently started an issue to help us get to know each other better: Add field for "Memberships in Associations, Societies, and Other Professional Organizations" to User Profile. The initial response was, "Don't see why not, but let's hear more support before we do." So this is an appeal to read the issue and consider giving it your support.

Is there a feature list and competition analysis Drupal or non Drupal intranet usable out of box ?
The main supects (for me) would be :

Build on top of Drupal http://commons.acquia.com & http://openatrium.com
In OpenSource http://buddypress.org/
In MS http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/
In Saas http://www.jivesoftware.com/ for business and http://ning.com for general public

If not already the case we can try to do that together...

We have quite some material in previous discutions
http://groups.drupal.org/node/53268
http://groups.drupal.org/node/45468

Join the #drupal-accessibility IRC Group now and meet with us on Tuesday, September 7th.

We'll review our progress on the #D7AX pledge, announce what is up for DrupalCon-Copenhagen, talk about our commits and the work that remains to be done for Drupal 7, and then develop our plans for Drupal 8.

For the latest agenda, read the full version of this item. To add an item to this agenda, either comment below or contact one of our group organizers — Cliff, mgifford, or brandonojc.

If you missed August's meeting, read the logs to find out what we got done then.

I've since started designing a variant of views that's specific to DrupalGardens, but thought some of you might like to see the concepts I came up with for the non DrupalGardens version of Views..

I just wanted a list of usability resources so thought I'd put the ones I knew about into a wiki & encourage others to expand it.

Drupal.org

• http://drupal.org/usability-aims

Design Books

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

The http://drupal.org/project/author_select module is up which transforms the autocomplete Authored By field to an HTML <select> widget (which seems to be much easier for clients to get a handle on).

I'd love it if you guys could try it out on a couple sites and let me know if you have any problems. It's really simple, but has made life a lot easier for a couple of our clients.

I'm gonna use comments to post seperate screens so they can be commented on individually and because I like seeing my own picture so much...

• Tried to start from scratch and only add the things needed to get up and running.
• Using D7 core patterns as much as possible. Combining, extending, abusing where needed.
• Not to forget how much we can win by rewriting form field labels and descriptions: http://skitch.com/yoroy/dg8ii/copy

..."The future in D7 and beyond is file (field)
along with PHP stream wrappers and other niceties. Media module makes
use of these features already.

We perhaps need a new discussion on groups.drupal.org, to analyze and
figure out what kind of functionality projects like Audio and Video
should provide, if any, starting from D7.

posted by sun on http://drupal.org/node/47998#comment-3139718

Drupal Accessibility IRC chat, we're setting up another one for July.

Join the #drupal-accessibility IRC Group now and make sure to be there on Tuesday, July 6th

The agenda is still being formed but will likely include:

• Agenda Review
• Drupal's Accessibility Statement
• #D7AX pledge progress
• Remaining items for D7
• Approaches for D8, especially in collaboration with usability team
• Setting the time for the next meeting

As part of a bigger usability testing, we recently usability tested Drupal 6 comment form.

I wrote a pretty detailed blog post on my blog.

Some of our findings generated the following issues:
http://drupal.org/node/796236
http://drupal.org/node/632380#comment-2962104

Interested in hearing your opinions.

Thanks,

Fabio Varesano

So given the interest and levels of participation in the May Drupal Accessibility IRC chat, we're setting up another one for June.

Join the #drupal-accessibility IRC Group now and make sure to be there on Tuesday, June 1st

The agenda is still being formed but will likely include:

• Drupal's Accessibility Statement
• #D7AX pledge progress
• Approaches for D8, especially in collaboration with usability team
• Remaining items for D7

Test plan for the overlay

Please upload videos you record of the tests to this vimeo group:

http://vimeo.com/groups/drupalux/videos/

Vimeo allows for videos longer than 10 minutes.

D7 UX will only be as good as contrib makes it

1. Document and keep improving the D7 IA.
2. Test and document core interaction patterns.
3. Keep usability testing and execute on the results. Improve this process.
4. Interface copy writing: continuous improvements towards consistency and brevity
5. Document and write style guide for Seven theme.

Moved to a wiki page for easier editing: http://groups.drupal.org/node/62588

Come hang with the cool kids before Drupalcon san francisco

This is an informal meetup for the designers / frontend geeks, themers etc you know who you are ;)

The plan is just to meet eachother before the con, and try to put a quick plan into play of where and what we wanna do with beautiful Drupal. Last

The meetup will be somewhere in the conference center. more info will follow

It will be sunday before the con at 15:00

This is an attempt to overcome the impasse over at Accessibility improvements for vertical tabs.

As I have already stated elsewhere the general problem with regard to accessibility and usability is that one size doesn't fit all.

So we should make some of the accessibility improvements more configurable. One way which even allows for configuration on an individual user level is a separate theme for accessibility settings.

I have received tremendous respons on this subject until now.
50+ comments on the discussion on GDO http://groups.drupal.org/node/45468
100+ people attended the real life Event WordPress / Drupal http://jbingold.com/content/rencontre-des-deux-mondes-wordpress-et-drupal

And today a twiit from a WordPress strategist http://www.twitter.com/roprice

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blockquote>@JBingold That session proposal looks terrific.. there's no question of the need for a BuddyPress equivalent in Drupal. Thanks