Usability

Problem

"As a content author I want to make a quick change to a block on a page I am editing without having to wade through many levels of navigation or a sea of options."

Focus of the study

To understand the following:

• Current Pain Points with Drupal
• Feedback on Spark
• End to end process of content creation process
• Applications used in conjunction with Drupal

Participant profile

<

ul>

UX open hours, 10 december 2012

Small meeting this time.

Content creation page

http://drupal.org/node/1838156 and http://drupal.org/node/1838114 need help. Everybody wants to see this new interface make it into Drupal 8. Now's the time to make it so! Background and more related issues to push forward in http://drupal.org/node/1510532#comment-6757500

Edit-in-place (all the things)

Kevin has been working on a prototyping on a unified approach for edit in place: http://invis.io/7H9SAI8N . Not in the issue queue yet, but a very promising concept, have a look!

One of the key things I wanted to do in the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative after the December 1st feature freeze hits is to go and do lots of user testing of the functionalities we built and adapt the user interfaces and flows to make it easier to build multilingual sites (and then test it again). Not many people believed this would actually happen (when you say in an issue you'll follow up with more user testing, and so on, it can be seen as just a way out to move on). However I've got outstanding help from Bojhan Somers, Dharmesh Mistry and Lisa Rex on best practices for user testing. I not only got help on the tools to use, but also building out a concrete test plan with Dharmesh and Bojhan actively involved. To say the test was well prepared is an understatement.

10 things you need to know to optimize a Drupal website for any device or platform.

When:
January 10th
North America – 2PM EST. Register Here
EMEA – 3PM GMT. Register Here

With bojhan, dcmistry, lisarex, kolearyUX, webchick and yoroy.

Topics

1. UX task list: where/how
2. Field UI revamp in core: possible past feature-freeze?

Maintaining an actionable task list for ux team

We discussed opening an 'uxteam' project on d.o/project/uxteam and use its issue queue to maintain a list of actionable tasks that aren't necessarily directly mappable to a core component or contrib project yet.

There's a Google spreadsheet where we tried to maintain a list of UX design tasks that are actionable, but not fit for a issue:

Have you ever wished core would track the date/time a node was published, instead of just when it was created and modified? Well, now is your chance! There is a patch in the issue queue, but it needs review and time is running out before feature freeze. Please get involved.

http://drupal.org/node/1838918

Modal dialogs are making their way into core and this could have a great impact on UX strategy for all of Drupal. In general modals are useful for allowing a user who is engaged in a primary task objective to temporarily carry out a ‘secondary’ task in an additional ‘window’.

The SiteBuilding Usability Initiative video released last month illustrates the general concept.

Gabor Hojtsy has been working hard to get the fundamental UI's in place to make the layout iniative happen. We decided during BADCamp that we needed to scale down our ambition, to get something into core. Although the API's have seen steady progress, we are yet to have any major UI facing parts in Drupal core.

To do this we now focus on allowing you to create at least "landing pages", static pages with a layout assigned to them.

[フレーム]

Status update at less than 2 weeks before feature freeze

First-off: everything is moving. This is good.

Hi Everyone,

I know, its been rather quiet from us since the announcement of the Drupal SiteBuilding Usability Initiative some two+ weeks ago. Well, BADCamp got in the way and Michael and Doug was busy mingling with all the amazing Drupalers there for starters. While they where doing that, I spent my time learning and configuring Open Atrium as we have chosen it as our collaboration platform for Drupal SBUI.

On Nov 1 2012, we tested the Views UI (7.x-3.5) with intermediate-level Drupal users at the BADCamp UX/UI Summit to provide the community with a clear picture of the usability bottlenecks in the Views UI

Check out Report from BADCamp 2012 Views Usability Testing for the full report. Help improve things in these issues

(disabling comments here, if you have feedback, please add it to the full report linked above, thanks)

Below are proposals to alter some of the Nomenclature of Drupal based on usability testing.

Views
Testing has shown that meaning of "views" is completely opaque to the new user and provides absolutely zero potential for unguided wayfinding. Also "views" conflicts with "view" in the context of content as well as "preview". We are testing a change to "content lists"

Taxonomy
Testing has shown that users cannot understand what taxonomy is or why they would need it. We are testing a change to "categories".

Modules

The D7 IA has evolved to be very wide and flat because the toolbar has a flat menu structure that requires a page load to drill down. As we re-structure the interaction pattern of menus we have an opportunity to reassess the IA. Wide top level menus with a large number of children made sense when every level down required a new page load. The new menu allows for deep exploration without the need for multiple page loads so we can build narrower and deeper and employ more hierarchies and sub-categorization that will inform the user. To illustrate this point I’ve created the following example:

Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object.
Source: Wikipedia

"Our ambition is to help improve the usability of Drupal for all user roles
– from core developers to anonymous site visitors"

What we would like to do (long term goal)

Quite a few people have asked for all the designs that Spark is working on to be accessible from one place so that they don't have to sift through all of the issues to find them. Below are links to all of the invision prototypes that are available right now as well as a few html prototypes and live demo sites. I have included the related issue numbers so you can make comments in the appropriate issue.

Bojhan and Dharmesh recently conducted a 6-participant moderated usability study on the new toolbar. The design was tested on desktop and mobile (and on the iPad in some cases).

Summary of findings
Overall, the toolbar prototype tested well on desktop and iPhones.

"This is a big improvement from where we are at [right now]" (P4)

Most of the participants (4 out of 6) had positive reaction. The rest of the participants (2) had a neutral response to the change. The mobile version was significantly better received than the desktop experience.

As you may or may not know Blocks and layouts is a design problem that I have been working on for the better part of three years since I first started working at Acquia. Back then Jeff Noyes, Dries and myself were just focused on introducing drag-drop blocks to Drupal Gardens and didn't have a view to the wider problem of layouts because really at that point seven was not even out and it just seemed too big a problem to solve.

November 16-18 is an exciting time to be in Toronto if you are interested in Drupal and Accessibility.

Along with:

• DrupalCamp Toronto - November 16-17
• AccessibilityCamp Toronto - November 17

Drupal Accessibility Sprint Toronto -- #a11ySprint

We are planning on doing some usability testing of the mobile prototype, below we have outlined the test plan. Since we haven't tested this prototype much, we are focusing our initial test plan primarily on finding out how they experience the navigation - not necessarily how they experience the admin theme.

Only local images are allowed.

Name of the project: Toolbar testing
Type of study: Moderated
Focus of the study: To get answers to the following high-level questions: