Usability

I've been doing some work on the node administer form at admin/content/node, to move the filter storage from a session to $_GET params in the URL. This could have several benefits:

1. The filtered pages are then bookmark-able and shareable
2. The filters will be reset every time a user navigates away for an extended period of time, or through multiple pages

There are also disadvantages:

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Hi. This summer I wrote Drupal's Plugin Manager module. It is designed to allow users to install modules and themes directly from drupal.org using local ftp or ssh. Now, after a few releases and with another person on the project (jabapyth,) I'm starting to notice the traps that we've carefully laid out for ourselves. Thus, Jabapyth and I are planning to rewrite the UI for the module. This is where I was hoping for some help. I hope for us to create an interface that is not a headache waiting to happen.

I'm in the middle of trying to figure out the right experience for installing and using Acquia's hosted search platform. In doing so, I had to think about how to build pages that were Solr enabled. In parallel, I've been thinking about a better way work with blocks. The two topics were fairly connected, so I started working on some concepts.

Maybe some solutions presented in the following report from Ball State University could help with Drupal 7 usability improvements?

Hello,

I am a writer with years of professional experience and a passion for web usability. I'd like to copy edit the Drupal core ui text.

Simple copy editing can dramatically improve usability and user-friendliness. Drupal would be easier to learn and use by, for example, eliminating repetition and unnecessary words.

To give you an idea of what I have in mind, let's take a look at this dreadful ui language from Drupal 6's admin/build/block page:

There's a key question in the air about appearance of drupal titles.
The question is if replaced elements if a title/heading (h1) should contain emphasis (em) or no.

In Drupal core are several examples for pro and con. The title appears also as browser title.

Samples are: (percentage variables replaced as plain text in this sample)

Only local images are allowed.

I've been working on a project to make the structuring of content easier / more intuitive. The module was called the Outline Designer and now there's a Drupal 6 version out now. Please check out the demo below and let me know what you think. It implements a bunch of usability things I've been seeing thrown around on here as well as introduces some new concepts (like a context menu). It integrates / overrides the admin/content/book interface to add ajax elements such as deletion, add a child, content editing, and renaming.

Demo - https://elearning.psu.edu/demos/outline_designer/

I put this screencast together that outlines some possible resolutions to the problems identified usability testing. The screencast picks up some of the latest design work put forward by many of you (admin interface, input formats, revealing admin nodes, etc). In most cases I built on top of your work.

What do you think?

http://www.jeffnoyes.com/content/drupal-6-usability-improvements-part-1

I recently got frustrated enough with the admin/settings/filters page to build a module to rebuild it for Drupal 6. Input Format Manager

My three significant changes to the default page are:

1. Putting all the links on to one page. The default admin page currently forces you to click "configure" and then "configure" again on the next page to set the individual filter options.

Hi everyone - I mentioned my user research study a while back [http://groups.drupal.org/node/15941]. I'm currently in my second big push for participants and I need your help!

Please forward on - http://tinyurl.com/6mnos4 - to web developers you know (Drupal or non).

If they are building or maintaining a website using a CMS, they're probably eligible for the study. If you're part of the usability group, I'd prefer you didn't sign yourself up, unless you don't work in the usability/interaction design field (or were educated in it) - in that case - sign yourself up!

thanks!

I developed a small module (Drupal 6) that allow to Set the Menu Settings with certain Menus for content editing (Node Edit Form) by Content Type (in Node Type Form).

utility
example1 : i want that the menu-settings just show up on content-type "page" and not on other content-types. so that users wont be confused to have these settings where they dont make sense.

example2 : for the "Images" content Type I want to have only "Images" Menu availbles for "images" content.

chx is working on a very interesting patch http://drupal.org/node/332303 what by theory can totally redefine Drupal installer experience. The trick is to use a lightweight SQLite database what should be built-in to PHP 5.2 - so you will get your site running without providing mysql/postgres database credentials at all. If needed, you can migrate over to these "big boy" databases later. It simplifies Drupal code and removes the need for weird code trickery in the installer.

This might be somewhat off-topic for this group. If it is, I apologize and please delete this post.

A customer of ours asked to put his product catalog online. As an example he provided http://www.achatimedia.net/guides/sicli/catalogue_content.html. He also wants it to be searchable and there will be an e-commerce part. We explained that using Flash for this is not the best idea and that it is better to make sure that everything is categorized correctly and etc. etc.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6607145.html

With the granular level of control that Drupal offers, early testers have been overwhelmed by the number of options they have to personalize their Web sites, from how they want their events calendars to look to whether they want to have a gift registry. "We’re very enthusiastic about having an open-source Web site," said Kerry Slattery, general manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, one of the first booksellers to sign with BookSense.com. "But we can see that there’s a learning curve on this."

We just contributed a new module named popup message about improve drupal "Status/Error Message" UI.
We use a javascript box like twitter fox / msn to notice user have new status message coming.

message display at the bottom of page, and count down close button.

For example , when adding a new post, user often ignore top of the message, they would like to scroll down to see what happened. Or when user login/logout to drupal site, they don't really know what they done in last page.

Hi All,

The redesign has made great progress over recent weeks and we would really like to share this with you!

Below is a link to the latest iteration of the redesign prototype. Please take the time to look through the pages and feedback your thoughts and ideas in this thread.

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration5

We also welcome comments on the initial design and visuals, and as with previous weeks, all posts here will be read and fed back into the redesign process

I want to clue in everyone on a project I'll be working on to add to the user experience research that's been building in this group. I decided not so long ago to focus on user research for an independent study (I'm working towards an MS in interaction design & information architecture at the University of Baltimore, where we did the second Drupal usability study - http://groups.drupal.org/node/12447) this Fall semester.

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