Usability

We set dates and an agenda for the three days of UX sprint: http://groups.drupal.org/szeged-uxsprint
Just want to keep everyone posted so you can plan your Drupalcon Sessions...
First day is not completely safe as it depends on Jeff Noyes and Dries, but the rest should be O.K.

If the Schedule does not appear right to you, please comment.

(or how to reduce a module's functionality)

During it's lifetime a contributed module's functionality expands, which often leads to a module packed with features. This growth of features is common for all software, but for Open Source the rate of expansion seems even higher. Feature rich software may be beneficial to the user but it comes at a price. Usability often suffers.

Hi, I posted a lengthy rant on Drupal UI challenges -- sort of an introduction to my thinking and experiences tracking Drupal UI story so far.

http://kika.trip.ee/node/364

Discussion is welcome both here in this thread or over in my site.

Forget about the user. There is no average user. "The User" does not exist. There are different users, with different goals, different backgrounds and different levels of experience.

I've created a screencast comparing the user experience for entering data via Markdown vs. TinyMCE WYSIWYG:

WYSIWYG vs. HTML Helper Screen Cast at Blip.tv

This is the tweaked summary of this IRC chat.

We will focus on improving usability for new users.

There will be a usability BoF every day of the conference.

Schedule:

UX Sprint Day 1: Introduction and clearing of main issues
(see List below), probably together with Dries and Jeff Noyes
Wednesday, Aug 27, 4pm Cisco BoF room
(maybe everyone pick a task on end of Day 1)

UX Sprint Day 2: Forming of workgroups, working on tasks and discussion in small groups...

If there can be any doubt, what users miss in core Drupal, have a look at this
http://drupalmodules.com/top-downloads

As the numbers of downloads rise beyond 3000, these relations start to get representative, or at least more so.

How about thinking about this.
Garland has had its time, and it starts to really hurt my eye.
Sure going for a recolorable theme is a given necessity.

I opt for Pixture, as I see it is very popular, and also because it looks "Joomly" (this may be a reason for people to NOT use it, I know ;) )
In is actual edition it has layout tables, but I'm working on this flaw with someone. Sure I'm not totally out of hunger for personal fame, but more importantly this would get away from the "Drupal looks like Garland" opinion.

Maybe this is already discussed and I'm only missing it?

So we want to work on Drupal usability during Drupalcon. I proposed to have 3 BoF sessions during the first 3 days of the conference:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/12972

Let's have a chat in IRC and come up with an agenda and try to focus on the important issues that we could really work on in Szeged.

We will meet in the #drupalcon channel

Hello,

I am a Summer of Code student working on a project called Embed Widgets (http://drupal.org/project/embed_widgets). It allows widgets to be created from Drupal content such as nodes, blocks, or views. Content must first be added as a "widget source" before it can be embedded in a widget. Widgets can be embedded in various formats such as IFrames and Google Gadgets, with more to come.

My project is going great and is nearly complete, but one concern I have is the user interface. I am looking for ways to improve it.

Just found this app. Thought I would share it. Havent tried it yet (not a mac user).

Spontaneous, unobtrusive usability testing software for designers and developers.

* Capture screen activity
* Video the participant’s reactions
* Record the participant’s voice
* Add chapter markers on the fly
* Control recording with the remote
* Export to Quicktime

http://www.silverbackapp.com/

I think it's time taxonomy module got some more love in core. Drag and drop etc. was nice to get in D6, but there's much more we could do. Also I keep seeing various taxonomy administration helper modules cropping up - which is good, but there's no core patches cropping up alongside them, which is a shame, so I'm starting this in the hope of generating some discussion about things we could do this release cycle.

There's three obvious areas where Taxonomy could use some help.

Administration:

Merging terms.
Moving terms between vocabularies.
Mass operations (delete, edit).

Awaiting suggestions before I set my own standards

The Drupalcon Track "Showcases, User Experience and Design" is still taking Session proposals.

It would be great to have more Presentations on UX Matters. Drupalcon is a wonderful Opportunity to contibute to the topic and maybe get more People on it, as targeted in the proposed Usability Sprint
Anything that touches the Topic UX is welcome. Following the discussions here there is no shortage.

Improving usability is a top priority for Drupal 7: http://buytaert.net/usability-usability-and-usability

So, it is also a big topic for Drupalcon in Szeged. Besides presentations and sessions we should work out a format for actually getting some stuff done, too. Let's call it a Usability Sprint. We should focus on fixing the actual issues found by the two usability tests.

The best way to propose new UI improvements for Drupal is writing proof-of-concept modules. It would be great to get some of those done during a focussed Usability Sprint.

So, how's this for an ideal usability sprint scenario:

BoF Usability Sprint Day 1

• zoom in on 1 or 2 issues we already decided upon before the conference
  (redo admin categories, modules page, permissions page...)
• bring your ideas and proposals
• discuss the options, decide on 1 or 2 things we can work on.

example:
- do a card sort on the admin categories
- discuss the different 'dashboard' approaches people already use
- choose 2 options we want to compare / test

another example:
- let's pick a nice chunk of core interface text: labels, descriptions, help
- rework them for clarity, consistency and brevity.

Story to Article seems to have been a good move (and people who haven't tried out a new D6 yet keep suggesting it again all over the place).

However page is still there, and according to both UMN and UB testing, causes conceptual problems for a lot of people.

I took a quick look at wordpress - which has 'posts' and 'pages', here's what they've got to say for themselves:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages

There's also a slightly dusty patch here to rewrite the descriptions (again): http://drupal.org/node/233200 and which I'm planning to resurrect.

From the Information Week article on Drupal.

There are numerous usability issues centred around the administration of nodes. Of particular interest in this discussion is the admin/content/node page. The aim of the discussion is to identify the problems, propose solutions and then break those solutions down into specific tasks that we can put into the issue queue.

The discussion really began at http://groups.drupal.org/node/12507#comment-40213, and so the points made there are summarised below. (An issue has also been created at http://drupal.org/node/270912, but we will probably have to implement several issues to fix this.)

The plan is to solve the following problems:

• New installations provide a set of instructions on how to set up a site. But this disappears as soon as you put something on the front page.
• When users upload content, they frequently lose it
• When new things happen on the site (e.g. actions are triggered, comments get posted), users have to click all around the place to find out what has happened.
• There is very little distinction between a site builder and a site administrator.

Administrator or Site builder or Both

Attached are the results from the usability study I did for at the University of Baltimore. This was for the Research Methods class with Professor Kathryn Summers - we did usability testing with an eyetracker and looked at the results.