Usability

For GHOP we had a student build an "undesriable string alter tool" (it needs a new name). Basically you configure it for 1) words that are commonly used but not very usable 2) which sites it should run on. Then whenever it finds them it will highlight them yellow and pop up a bar on the bottom of the page which lists all the occurrences of the word.

You can get more information about it on the website of the person who built it or in the issue where it was discussed/built.

Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities. We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications.
http://fluidproject.org/

Fluid plans to build its site and UX component/design pattern library in Drupal, and thus might be a valuable collaboration group for folks focused on Drupal UX.

Fluid is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

FOSDEM in Brussels will have a Drupal Devroom.

Perhaps we could get some usability stuff done together?

I recruited a 13-year old kid to claim a GHOP project. "Recruited" is an exaggeration, I just sent him a brief e-mail and he did the rest on his own. He was mentored by webchick who gave him great feedback.

He did a usability study and came up with a few interesting observations. He has posted issues on all of them.

The study that he did was on setting up a Drupal sight from scratch.

The regular Monday Meeting to improve Drupal Usability and fight the mess. Some Threads that have been started here in the group should be followed. Hence a few topic suggestions:
- Inconsistent or Not-so-unterstandable Naming in Admin Forms
- Yoroy's last mockup of node edit form
- Bevans Participation in the Season of Usability

Please comment for other topic suggestions.

Only local images are allowed.I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal.

As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.

To make a start, I tried my luck with a working version. Since it was easier to do, I published it as Google Doc.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgzwvm6w_9hgp9w2
Beware, long load time because of big images!
The approach is deliberately ambitious. As I also write in the doc, we will cut down later anyway. I'm aiming at enticing other designers to try their luck. We need different approaches, compare and discuss.

The regular Meeting for everybody interested in Usability in Drupal - (and surely Usability in General ;) ). We got a lot of interesting ideas and some projects have been started.

Proposals for a topic are welcome - post as comments.

Attaching some thoughts on how to improve the organisation and layout of the panels administration pages. I started pasting this together before I coud see that the img tag is allowed in wiki pages. Let me know if you'd like a certain screenshot to be instantly visible here. I have an .ODT of this document as well but that's bigger than the 1MB limit for attachments here.

There are a few issues in GHOP on usability and a several for user interface. Most of the user interface issues are already claimed, but none of the usability ones have any interest yet. I wonder if they are just newer if kids aren't interested in usability, or if the tasks are too vague.

How can we promote usability in the programme? With youths?

Chris Messina's (aka Factory Joe) review of drupal 6 is a big contribution to drupal usability. I have highlighted about 50 actionable issues that have been raised and/or discussed through this review. Most of them are trivial changes for drupal 6, but are key usability improvements. Many are simply improving the help text. Some are larger tasks that require more work and changes and should probably wait for drupal 7.

UI-Patterns.com is a great resource for information architects, UX designers, UI specialists, but most of all, for developers!

How can something like this be made more useful and usable by developers of both drupal core and contrib? I would like to see usability start at drupal's roots, rather than being left for an after-thought. (This too-often results in interfaces that are harder to fix than they would have been to get right the first time).

One of my main problems with Drupal UI was the module install page. The checkboxes are very small, especially considering that is the interacting part in the form, and there is way too much information in the description column. The length of the list is another issue too.

To solve the first pair of my problems i added some minimal hacking to system.module, and created a script that checks the module checkbox when the row of the module is clicked. I attach the screenshots, javascript and diff file for Drupal 5.3. What do you think?

Not exactly related to Drupal, but this is a quite interesting article about Firefox 3.

The article is about design, UI, usability of course, but also about how they affect the perception of the brand. It's nice to read about the reasoning behind the forthcoming changes, and could be an inspiration to us when we think about possible changes in Drupal's UI.

Robert Douglass sounds the call for reviews of three key taxonomy usability improvements:

This is just a small step towards making forms more usable. I've made a block to toggle the display of field descriptions (the tiny help texts below input fields). The idea is that once you've read them you don't need them anymore, so they just as well could go away. Still it should be easy to get them back instantly, in case you forgot what a field was about.

Please go to http://demo.guruburu.com and check it out. Create an account and try "My account" and "Create content". And tell me below what you think.

Following webchick analisys of oters sites.

From an usability standpoint I think we should consider seriously point 4 of Request for proposals for a redesign of Drupal.org - Scope and Guidelines: 4. Developers -> Future dev landing page?

The taxonomy help page text is not quite as good as it could be. Please help rewrite it. This is a wiki page. Discuss changes in comments and weave them back into the main text. I'll include the text twice. The first text is the reference and the second instance of the text is the revised text that we'll try to put into Drupal 6.

Here it is - the current text as a reference:

The taxonomy module is one of the most popular features because users often want to create categories to organize content by type. A simple example would be organizing a list of music reviews by musical genre.

What are the action items we are working on? Links to all usability-related issues and an overview of the most urgent action items: http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core/usability.

Where is the general usability discussion taking place? Mostly in the group posts below and over Mark Boulton group, also in the #drupal-usability IRC channel. Keep up to date by following the #drupalusability and #drupal7ux Twitter tags. There is also a aggregated Yahoo Pipe to collect all things Drupal usability: as webpage and as RSS

Designers and usability people welcome