Usability

It is that fantastic time of the year where we try to figure out if we are going to make it BADCamp this yet. I am excited that I will be attending this year as well. It is not only the biggest camp but also a great collaborative area to talk, share, discuss ideas/plans and move forward.

I am hoping to have a UX dinner (or something) at some point during the event so that we can address some of the UX issues. So, let us know:

1. Will you be at BADCamp?
2. What are the tentatives dates will you be in the city?
3. Any tentative dinner dates that work for you?

On behalf of the SF Bay Area Drupal community, I want to invite everyone to attend this year's Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) hosted on the beautiful campus of the University of California at Berkeley from Thursday, November 1st through Sunday, November 4th. Now in its sixth year, BADCamp is the flagship Drupal event of the San Francisco Bay Area and is expected to draw almost 2000 attendees for four days of summits, sessions, sprints, and social events.

Only local images are allowed.

Hola Drupaleros, my name is José, and I’m the Local Track Chair for the Frontend Track at DrupalCon Sao Paulo 2012. Did you know that in December will take place the first Drupal Con in LatinAmerica, right? Of course you knew!!

I know you have brilliant ideas and wonderful experiences you would like to share with the Drupal community, and this is your chance! Today I'm inviting you to submit your session proposals to the Frontend track.

Hello everyone.

I'd like to invite you to use UCDmanager. It's a personal project that allows to manage different usability techniques:

UCDmanager http://ucdmanager.net

I think it may be interesting to this group because it's based on Drupal, and because it allows to perform usability techniques in a collaborative way, that is very important in open-source developments. You could use it, for instance, to planificate, perform and communicate the results of usability evaluations of Drupal core or modules.

A saw EclipseCG's session at DrupalCon Munich where he demonstrated the great improvement work he has done to Blocks and Layout for D8. I am really looking forward to be able to start experimenting with that.

However, the demo also showed a typical case for where we can greatly improve the usability, and UX feedback for site builders when, as in this demo, adding a new block from the library.

As it works today:

1 - Click the "Add block..." link
2 - The library page replaces the page
3 - Pick a block and you get to a third page

The work being done by Bojhan and others in this group, as well as within the Spark and other initiatives is simply amazing. It will undoubtedly lead to better UX and usability for especially those that will work with content.

As a site builder I am very eager to be able to get more involved in this work. Personally I am most interested in helping to test the usability and UX when constructing these editing interfaces, and provide feedback on that. Especially since it is those interfaces I as a site builder will be using the most in my work.

I've in the middle of a series of 6 posts presenting my views and ideas on how to make the Drupal Learning Curve less steep by better understanding and improving the site builder experience.

Its my opinion that by doing so it will also make it much more easy to not only build sites with better usability/UX for users, but also sites that are easier to maintain and expand with new features.

Summary

After many intense discussions on the concept model, we have a working prototype as a deliverable and would like to get your feedback on our progress. The current version of the prototype takes the technical as well as the UX challenges of building this for Drupal core.

This post gives background to how we got to the prototype, outlines some of the major concerns and gives a detailed description on the process we followed. With feature freeze coming quickly it’s likely we need to move faster on the remaining tasks outlined at the end of this post.

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Previously, we had a friendly discussion on what we could use as a responsive layout framework for Drupal.org. Rupl, Banghouse, and myself played around with a lot of the options discussed in that post to work out which would be a good fit for us. Snugug also volunteered to help us out with technical questions and implementation.

We ended up deciding that using a Sass framework solves a lot of our problems, specially Susy. Implementing this framework is no small feat. We wrote a little summary of the Sass, Compass, and Susy implementation.

The next happy hour is on June 11, 2012 (Monday) on IRC channel #drupal-usability. The agenda for the meeting is:

Blocks and Layouts initiative
Renaming default menu's
Mobile

P.S.: Make sure to check the right time zone for the meeting. The meeting is scheduled for 4 PM (EDT).

Greetings from the Spark team! :)

We've been busy the past few weeks on research and development of a prototype for in-place editing. http://buytaert.net/spark-update-in-line-editing-in-drupal has more details, as well as a short 5-minute video so you can see what we're currently planning.

Feedback welcome! Here or in the issue queue!

The next happy hour is on May 28, 2012 (Monday) on IRC channel #drupal-usability. The agenda for the meeting is:

• Blocks and Layouts initiative
• Strategy for Views UI
• On ramp process for Drupal

P.S.: Make sure to check the right time zone for the meeting. The meeting is scheduled for 4 PM (EDT).

For the Spark project, we're looking for a WYSIWYG editor. It must work well on mobile devices, hence HTML5 is pretty much a necessity. A WYSIWYG editor still involves a lot of JavaScript, so solid JavaScript is also important.

However, for the Spark project, the WYSIWYG goal is somewhat different than the "typical" WYSIWYG goal. We're looking for a "true WYSIWYG" editor, which we can define as a WYSIWYG that matches all CSS selectors identically like the eventual document would.

The short story

Come and help us perfect and implement the hot new mobile interface design in Drupal 8. Try the prototype on your phone. Also, go to the issue queue.

The long story

Over the past six months we've been working on designing the experience of getting to where you want within Drupal's admin interface.

Goal

The goal of the study was to uncover usability issues with the new prototype for the content creation experience for Drupal 8. The study was conducted with new and existing users.

Methodology & Participant Demographics

• 11 participants ( 6 existing users and 5 new users) were tested for this study. Based on the availability of the participant and flexibility of the contributor, the studies were moderated (5 existing users and 1 new users) or unmoderated (1 existing user and 4 new users) using userfeel.com
• Sessions lasted from 30 minutes to 60 minutes.
• Participants of this study write/edit content on a content management system and write content at least more than once a month. The participant screener can be found here: https://docs.google.com/a/acquia.com/document/d/1KcL3aNUceVKXi9HLAubZv70...
• Participants were asked to think aloud and perform tasks followed by a brief scenario. The study plan can be found here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/223959
• The study was conducted in April 2012.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is a community-driven effort whose goal is to focus one day to raise the profile of digital (web, software, mobile app/device, touch screen kiosk, etc.) accessibility and people with different disabilities.

The idea started with a single blog post. On May 9th, people in communities around the world are encouraged to hold a talk/meetup, organize hands-on demos, or plan another activity that brings attention to some aspect of digital accessibility. Follow @GblA11yDay on Twitter and use the #gaad hashtag in your own tweets.

Droplabs is happy to participate in this global event. We will have both Dallas Legan and Larry Hart on-hand to present:

• Dallas Legan is a well-respected member of the Southern California Open Source ecosystem. He has presented on a variety of topics at UUASC, LAMP-SIG, the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group, the San Gabriel Valley Linux Users Group and SCALE.
• Larry Hart is a longtime member of the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group. He also happens to be a blind web user and will be imparting both his knowledge and frustrations of using a non-accessible web. We hope this will lead to discussions on how we, as web developers, can create a more usable and accessible web.

Hey,

The next happy hour is on April 30, 2012 from 4 PM (EST) to 5:30 PM (EST) in #drupal-usability channel, because turn out has been a bit low lately we are switching the format this time to allow for more sprinting than just discussion.

The rough agenda for the meeting:
1. Updates on Blocks & Layout and outreach
2. Update by technika on orientation.
3. Issue queue
4. Sprinting on the findings of our content creation usability study
5. If you have any designs (core or contrib), we could review them (bring screenshots/demo).

We want to give you a quick run through our ideas and current state of research for the Blocks & Layout initiative. I am working together with Useradvocate and EclipseGc to form a broad understanding.

One of the first things I want to tackle is describing how we use "context", because this is one of the most common questions. A really quick way of describing it is that context(s) are the data objects that blocks depend upon, to determine when display (yes/no) and how to display.

I want to get serious about redoing the information architecture of Drupal. To be frank, it's a problem. Users don't know what's structure and whats content. Neither do we. I see developers all the time asking where their modules belong.

As part of the Drupal.org code sprint in Portland; Chris Ruppel, Joel Moore and myself have been discussing a new Bluecheese. A lean, tight, and admin friendly theme that lays out a framework for the future. One that would allow us to develop a mobile friendly, responsive design.

What we want

An admin friendly UI