Usability

I have trouble finding icons sometimes for my designs. Thought this might be of help...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/07/50-fresh-useful-icon-sets-for...

Welcome, how nice of you to drop by. Some quick pointers if you'd like to dive deeper into the ongoing ux design work for Drupal core & contrib:

Where the work is done:
- Core issues tagged 'usability'

Where documentation lives:
- User interface standards

Meetings get organised:

This might be a Zen-theme specific issue, so forgive me if that is the case.

If I want to make the Primary Links block not appear, then I do so from the "Blocks" page. But to make the items in "Primary Links" not appear as tabs at the top of the page, then I do so from the in "Toggle Display" section of the the Administer-->Site Building-->Themes-->Configure page.

The Drupal Design Camp Boston website is launched and we are getting ready for the June 13-14 event at MIT.

The attendee list is growing, and the sponsors are almost as excited as we are!

If you plan to attend, jump in at http://boston.design4drupal.org and sign up before it fills up completely.

Attendees can submit sessions, post to forums, join live chat on IRC, make small financial donations, and check out the latest News.

You can also follow us on twitter at D4DBoston.

The sprint will be held at One Shoe http://www.oneshoe.nl/ in downtown utrecht which is one of the largest Drupal developing companies in holland. We have space for 20+ people in their nice and spacious office. Utrecht has lots of opportunities to go out in the evening, and with the Drupal Jam on Friday, this is bound to rock for all attendants.

Starting time will be at 10:00 in the morning on both days.

All people that care for UX are welcome. We can use: Graphic Designers, Coders, Copy Writers, Themers and CSS Ninjas

Confirmed Participants so far:

Project information

Project: http://drupal.org/project/uts
Status: Implement multivariate testing API and analysis/dashboard improvements. (June 20 - August 8)

Description

The Usability Testing Suite that I created during SoC 2008 needs additional work in order to make it ready for use. The existing module provides a powerful API that makes writing data collection plug-ins simple, but the user interface needs refinement and a screen recording plug-in would make the module much more helpful. Through this project I intend to finalize the Usability Testing Suite and make it ready for widespread use.

Additional Reading:

• SoC 2008 - Usability Testing Suite
• Soc 2009 - Usability Testing Suite
• Official Proposal

There are many Drupal 7 core issues that are tagged as "Needs usability review". It would be awesome to try and keep an eye on this list and review UI changes that are going in to core/7, with the aim of trying not to degrade Drupal usability further with un-monitored changes, as we usually do in Drupal core. The most important ones to review are the ones that are in the review process, marked RTBC or recently committed.

Vertical tabs are finally in Drupal core!

Only local images are allowed.
Screenshot of vertical tabs on an 'Article Edit' page in Drupal 7.

A week ago Angie "webchick" Byron committed a large patch from #323112 Vertical Tabs to Drupal 7 core. This change is quite possibly the most significant usability enhancement to Drupal 7 to date. Two of the three formal usability tests did usability testing with vertical tabs and reported positively.

Only local images are allowed.
Screenshot of a 'Story Edit' page in Drupal 6, before vertical tabs.

UPDATE: Rob Loach has created a patch to implement vertical tabs on the node-type form.

UPDATE: See other issues about vertical tabs in Drupal core .

What is more interesting about this however, is the process, time and effort that it took to get this change into Drupal core. It all started over a year ago, well before DrupalCon Boston 2008 even before Drupal 6 had a stable release. The discussion around part of that patch goes back as far as November 2007! Along the way countless people have been involved in many discussions, worked on heaps of mockups, lots of prototypes, and loads of code.

Read more

There's been some really great work done looking at usability within Drupal - http://www.d7ux.org/

However, I do think that it is important to start talking about accessibility with any new visions of how content is going to be created and sites are going to be administered.

Drupal Design Camp Boston is a free, two-day Drupal conference on June 13-14, 2009, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is being organized by members of the Boston Drupal group as part of the growing Design 4 Drupal initiative that launched when designers and themers took DrupalCon DC by storm this past March.

This camp also coincides with the drupal.org redesign sprint at the MIT Media Lab on Friday, June 12. The sprint picks up where the San Francisco redesign sprint left off and participants at the Boston sprint will be learning how to contribute to theming drupal.org as well as implement the redesign.

I have run into a limitation with the processing of menu items. If I enter a URL into the link, such as "about" (where I have a page with URL "about"), then the system replaces this with something like "node/8". That is problematic because I entered a logical reference and ended up with a physical reference (which is always inflexible design). So if I replace my about page later with a fresh one that has a different node number, then I have to go through all the menus looking for items that referenced about, and re-entering "about" or entering the new node number.

Regarding the "Usability Group", how come in the Usability column on the right it's called "Create Discussion, when you create a new discussion it's called "Submit Discussion" and after you submit/create your discussion, it gets put in a column called "Recent Posts"?

This kind of stuff pisses me off and even worse, it pisses my dog off too!

Happy Wednesday,

logiclab

I am very new to Drupal and maybe I just don't get it but
wouldn't it simplify the work flow putting a Take Site Offline
button and an Update Database button on the modules
page instead of having to

1. go to the site maintenance page and take the site offline
2. go to the modules page and select new modules
3. type in the URL to Update the Database
4. go back to the site maintenance page and put site back online

They could be nice AJAX windows that mask the background.

In discussing the question of inserting a tabindex to create an auto focus for certain pages (/user*, /node/add*, node/*/edit) so that the cursor is always sitting in the first field of the event in question, v suggested that this was more of a usability issue than an accessibility one. I recorded a friend with mobility challenges trying to create an account for those who want some understanding of how important this could be.

We've just added a new video to the YouTube Channel which we refer to in this post - check it out now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShBPEL_ckJw

Over the past week or so Mark and I have been working out the details that go on the panels of the Audience Matrix that we shared with you last week (http://www.disambiguity.com/understanding-our-audience-part-1-drupal7-ux...) (or dress-up-doll document as it has otherwise been named). We’ve made a few changes and added a bunch of definitions.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

ROLES:

I joined the Drupal community 3 years ago and it has been instrumental in helping me to stay up to date with the latest web trends / developments. Since about 1 year, I've been using Drupal to teach my web engineering students interaction design and information architecture in a practical, hands-on way, by building prototypes with Drupal.

In my opinion, the best kept secret about Drupal is that its power is not so much the technology - a web content management framework. The power lies in the community. Unfortunately, there is still somewhat a divide between designers and developers.

Drupallers, take note of the Interaction Design community (IxDA)! If you haven't already.

I joined the ixda mailing list 3 years ago and it has contributed immensely to my personal growth as an interaction design practitioner. The in-depth design discussions in this community are a true treasure trove.

However, even with 10'000 members, I consider it still somewhat one of the internet's "best kept secrets". IMHO, the current website doesn't succeed well in representing the power of this community. Just recently, IxDA announced plans to re-launch the ixda.org website using Drupal. See Dries Buytaert's blog post about it.

There has been some talk recently at ixda about "open source user experience" and collaborating with the open source movement and learning from each other. I think this is a fantastic opportunity just waiting to happen!

You may have heard the excellent and very exciting news that following on from our work on Drupal.org, Mark Boulton Design has been contracted to take a look at the User Experience for the upcoming Drupal 7, and I'm very happy to be working with him on this project as well.

There is a discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/19171 regarding revamping the administrative menu. It seems to me that the issue of the improving the menu INTERFACE is different than the issue of STRUCTURE. Here, I'd like to see if we can gather the discussion of practical alternative menu interfaces for core. As I mentioned in the aforementioned thread, please let me know if I'm duplicating efforts here.

I compiled a Yahoo Pipe what collects Drupal UX-related posts from Drupal Planet, Twitter, this group and d7ux group. It's available here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=dNbdZy8L3hGbZFW9Pm7D0g (click "List" tab to make a list), it's also available as RSS: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=dNbdZy8L3hGbZFW9Pm7D0g&_render...

Anybody up for maintaining and upgrading it? As I am constantly on and off with Drupal it would be a pain to see this thing is not properly cared.

At Drupalcon 2009 in Washington, the Drupal design community were asked to become active participants in contributing feedback to the Drupal project.

mfer was kind enough to give members of the Design for Drupal (D4D) Group a tour of how we could provide feedback through the Issue Queue. As a matter of fact, we were shown a version of the issue queue in which any project could be flagged as "needs design review".