Usability

Hi all!
As a part of my course on Usability Design at the University of Leuven (Belgium), I'm doing a user and task analysis on Drupal.
I have started a user survey to collect useful data on the users of Drupal. With this data, I will create user profiles and personas to reflect some typical user groups of Drupal.

The survey can be found here: http://drupalsurvey.vanisterdael.be/index.php?sid=76524

Why are the "Administration Theme" settings are located in "Administer -> Site Configuration" area, rather than with all of the other theme settings in "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes".

The only unique configuration option that is in the "Administration Theme" menu is the "Use admin. theme for content editing" checkbox -- and this could simply be moved to the bottom of the list of themes in the "Administer -> Site Building -> Themes" menu. It seems unnecessary for this single option to have it's own section in the administration menu.

An update on usability testing at the University of Baltimore - I ended up putting together a very simple scenario involving page creation, navigation and permissions using the IRT node form - vertical tabs layout. I've tested this script in a session with our campus webmaster, and he was able to complete the tasks within the hour we had, but did have a couple problems. If you have any thoughts on the script, please post.

Better node admin content form module looks like a promising initiative to improve usability on the admin content page, despite the awkward name.

As does Form Table module which going by the description, appears to be implementing a project idea I had had for SoU:

Becca Scollan posted briefly here about a student project where they are considering doing some usability testing with Drupal at the University of Baltimore, which has the possibility to be expanded further in the summer. There are some preparation time constraints that at this point are leading her group to do consider completely replicating the scenario that was done at UMN, and it would be nice if some of the other admin test cases and tasks were fleshed out a bit more so that some new ground could be explored and to streamline the process a bit better.

There was talk at the UMN Usability session at Drupalcon that it would have been beneficial to set up the users with an initial "easy win" task that boosted their confidence -- like setting up an "About Us" page with a primary navigation link at the top. Webchick also pointed out that there were a number of task ideas that were discussed on this wiki page that were not executed, and that are still listed there with strikeout markup.

The intention of this wiki page is to flesh out some potential admin-related user scenarios that could be used now with this potential opportunity at the University of Baltimore. It could also serve as a general brainstorming place to flesh out other usability scenarios to be tested with other usability lab time as it becomes available.

Hi everyone,

Just reading through "Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries" and pulled this quote on current needs - -

"We want to see this happening more. The first goal is to measure the user experience, and not guess about it. One of the ways we can measure it is with usability testing, but we need labs and people to observe, facilitators to run the lab, and then interviewers to debrief the evaluators, and then resources to get everyone to the lab." (I think from Bevan Rudge)

Hi!

I make a module and implement hook_menu. Now I want to change the path for my module in navigation menu. I changed into code but it is to the old path. Can anybody help me to refresh the new path?
My old path is $items['admin/mybook'] and for new path I want $items['mybook']

Thank's for any help.

mihai

The finalized report documents just came in:

• Summary Report
• Issues Identification Matrix
• Issues Identification Matrix - Reordered

It might be obvious to some of you, but to me it certainly wasn't, so I thought a short link might be a good idea as most of you probably don't lurk around on Planet KDE or Planet Ubuntu. Do read usability professional Celeste Paul's refreshing realization:

• The #1 Problem in OSS Usability and What I'm Going to Do About It
• Short follow-up: Leadership is a problem but not the problem

First post here in this group, so a warm "Hi!" to everyone!

The background

Interesting application of vertical tabs.

Interesting idea of self-assessing a website for usability.

http://www.vkistudios.com/usability_assessment.cfm

I've long since been frustrated about the bad usability of the admin parts of Drupal. While incremental improvements are constantly made, it seems that a big overhaul is necessary in order to move forward. I find it very inspirational to see how Wordpress has hired HappyCog to work on an improved admin interface, based on interviews, research and usability testing. There are some obvious lessons that Drupal can learn from this as well, both from their methods as well as the results. There's a lot of momentum in the community right now to make similar efforts, and I'd be happy to apply as a student to work on this during the summer.

I propose a module that provides both an input filter and a widget used on the node edit form.

The filter would contain the path to an image file and the name or id of an imagecache preset.

The widget would allow the user to view images that exist on the site, and select which one should be inserted into the node body at a particular point, along with the preset that should apply to the display of this image. The widget would place the appropriate tag to be consumed by the filter when the node is rendered.

For anyone not on the Development list serve, there is a great discussion going on about module duplication, "scratch your itch" versus "control the chaos" approaches.

Less than 24 hours in, there are 30 posts. Really thoughtful stuff.

The first post is at: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-March/029249.html

In Dries' talk at DrupalCon Boston, he mentioned the need to remove code from core as well as add functionality. He specifically mentioned proposals to remove the throttle and ping modules from core.

Removing functionality is often an important thing to do regarding usability, and so I thought I'd raise this here.

I've just added an issue to the D7 queue a proposal to remove the "blog-it" functionality from aggregator.module. I've laid out all the arguments there. Please jump in and +1 it or argue otherwise.

With all the recent discussion about usability (also pushed on by the recent usabilty testing) I'd like to make a suggestion.

First, I'll outline two simple examples that I want to draw on (and don't run away at the offensive words!)

Microsft Word (and other word processors)

Ok, icon drawing time! Here's my suggestions for some specs and guidelines to get started with. All feedback welcome.

In the attachment:

• an icon template file for Inkscape
• basic directory structure for organising and categorisation of the icon sources and png renders.

The directories are mostly empty, but have a look in the applications and the mimetypes folder, there are SVG files for:

• forum icons
• calendar icons
• mimetype icons (with PSD sources for 16 and 32px versions which are actually further developed then the SVG!)

There's several simultaneous discussions going on about content types / node types - the terminology at that high level, and in terms of how we explain particular node types like "book page", "page" etc. and individual nodes/posts. So I'm starting this to try to draw some of them together.

Added to official ideas list at http://drupal.org/node/234746

GSoC Project idea: Suggested and discussed at UMN after Usability Testing as a way of Measuring the UX (user experience), and further discussed with Jimmy Berry, who is interested in taking this on as a student. Measuring the UX is the primary UX goal for Drupal.

This needs more work, but is a starting point for a project proposal.

Glossary:

• 'data' refers to user-input text and feedback, logs, video and audio