disambiguity

Drupal.org redesign – help usability test Iteration 6 next week!

As you may have read, we’ll be doing some usability testing on the 6th iteration of the Drupal.org prototype in London next week. It seems like a great time to also kick off some crowdsourced usability testing, as we’d talked about earlier, and for any of you who’d like to get involved to do so!

(UPDATED!) Iteration six is now live here. I’d like to encourage you to take part in our Crowdsourced Usability Testing Campaign by doing a few tests yourself, wherever you are in the world, and contributing your findings back to the project.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Find some participants to take part – we want a mix of people along the spectrum of Drupal involvement from those who don’t know much to those who know lots and are super involved. Some tips for recruiting can be found here (feel free to add any other tips you have to our wiki!)
2. Take a look at the prototype and work out how you’re going to approach the interview – some interview tips and a sample script can be found here (again, feel free to add more!)
3. Work out a way to record your interview – some ideas here. Personally, I’ve found remote testing more hassle than it’s worth and much prefer to do in person interviewing. My technology of choice is a MacBook with Silverback installed for audio and video recording (you can get a 30 day trial for free). 
4. Do your interviews!
5. Share your interviews and findings! I’ve been exporting and posting some interviews on Vimeo, which is my preferred video sharing site. You can put yours wherever you like, just link to them from the comments of this post once they’re posted (and/or add them to the wiki where mine are now) – if you have some time to write up what you’ve learned as a result of the testing that would be fantastic! (If not, don’t worry, we’ll take a look through the video ourselves!)

That’s it! Not so hard at all, is it!

If you have any questions at all, post them here (no matter how silly they may sound, chances are others have exactly the same question or it’s something I forgot to cover in this post or on the wiki!) – I or someone else helpful will get back to you ASAP.

This is a great opportunity to help out with the Drupal project and a great chance to get some usability testing experience under your belt – which is a really fantastic skill to have, whatever aspect of design or development you’re most into. I really encourage you to give it a try and look forward to seeing what you come up with! I’ll be sharing my videos as soon as I can export them after usability testing sessions on Monday 3/11

If you’re able to do some testing early next week and post your feedback mid-late next week that would be fantastic. If this schedule doesn’t work for you – don’t fret – more iterations are coming hot on the heels of this one and more testing will be required and welcomed! You can get involved in the next few weeks if that suits you better.

Good luck, thank you and yay!

Drupal.org redesign – Participate in Usability Testing in London!

You’re going to be hearing more and more about usability testing in the coming weeks! As you know, we’ve been including Drupal.org users in the redesign process from before the first wireframe was sketched, and we continue to include both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in the process – currently in the form of usability testing the prototypes as it moves from iteration to iteration.

We recently conducted some tests at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin which allowed us to talk to a bunch of European Drupal Users (and non-users too!). Now we’d like to do some usability testing in London (where I’m based).

If you’re in London on Monday 3 November and would like to participate – please email me leisa@disambiguity.com and let me know where you will be (I can meet you somewhere convenient) and when would suit you. I’ll need around 30-40mins of your time.

I’m looking for a mix of people who know a *lot* about Drupal (and are involved in the community) through to people who know not much about Drupal but who have some interest in content management systems for websites – whether for your own blog perhaps, or for a company or organisation you’re affiliated with.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any cash incentives for this project, but you will receive much gratitude and lots of good karma for helping build good user experience into an open source project.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Drupal.org – talking about the redesign project at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin

I hate seeing myself on video, but I thought you might be interested in seeing the very brief talk about the project that I did at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. It’s only 10 minutes long – enjoy!

Drupal.org redesign project – iteration 5 for your review!

Apologies for the lack of posting – it’s been a very busy month!
We are now up to the 5th iteration of the Drupal.org redesign – if you haven’t already, why not go take a look and let us know what you think of it.

you can find the prototype here: http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration5/

Feel free to leave comments here and I’ll make sure the entire team sees them!

Is disambiguity a word?

I had the pleasure of speaking at the User Assistance Conference in Edinburgh recently and spent one lunch time chatting with Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum, who is the Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and regular contributor to the Language Log. We were talking about whether or not ‘disambiguity’ was a real word. As you can imagine, he had much more thoughtful opinions on this than I did. Professor Pullum had an inkling that it wasn’t a proper word (although I think he kind of liked it anyway!)

Not long after lunch I received this email from the Professor that he had kindly allowed me to share with you because I know you’d be interested to know too!

I was not wrong: the entire 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, which records every lexeme ever attested in 700 years of the history of the English language, has no entry for “disambiguity” at all.

It also isn’t in Webster’s, the greatest dictionary of American English (search it online at http://www.webster.com):

Suggestions for disambiguity:

    1. disambiguate           2. disambiguates
    3. disambiguating         4. disambiguation
    5. disembogued            6. disambiguated
    7. disembogues            8. disambiguations
    …

Your word, with its verb-restricted “dis-” prefix (as in disable, disabuse, disagree, disallow, disappear, disarm, disband, disbar, disbelieve, etc.) and its noun ending, is entirely your own invention.

Though I should note that a few nouns formed from dis- verbs are found.”Disability” is one that has the -ity suffix.  So that is a sort of model, not in the sense that you did have it in mind, but in the sense that you could have done.  It shows that forming such a word is not out of the question for English word formation principles.  It’s just never been done before!

I’m fairly certain I’m not the first person to have ‘made up’ this word or that it’s ‘my word’, but I like it all the more after learning this little bit about it novelty. Linguists are cool.

Drupal.org – Crowdsourcing Usability Testing – Get Involved!

Another day, another way to be involved in the Drupal.org redesign project, and this one’s a little different – but I think it’s going to be great fun!

Here’s what we’re going to do.

I’m going to be doing some remote usability testing using screen sharing and screen recording software that I’ll share back with all of you and that will help guide the ongoing design of the prototype. In particular, I’m going to be doing research with ‘outsiders’.

If you have either experience or interest in helping in this research effort, then I invite you to help test the prototype, either by doing more online remote research, or – even better – by doing some ‘in person’ research with people near you – especially people who are Drupal insiders.

We can then all post the videos of our research together with our findings and recommendations in a central location, building an amazing resource to document the progress of the prototype and what has guided the decision making as it is designed.

We’ll be asking people to help out with testing for each iteration as it is released, so if you’re too busy (or nervous) now, then never fear, opportunities abound. In fact, there’s no reason why this should stop just because the redesign team are off the case.

This is a little more complicated than our original crowdsourcing effort (wireframing), so I’ve quickly thrown together the skeleton of a wiki where we can pull together a toolkit of need to know information for this project – technology to use, how to interview, how to analyse results, that kind of thing. If you have expertise in this area, please feel free to pitch in a few recommendations.

You can find the Crowd Sourcing Research Wiki here. (Be warned, it’s pretty ugly, but I’m too excited about this to spend time making it look pretty – anyone who wants to do so is more than welcome).

So, consider yourself invited. If you’d like to be involved in helping test the prototype then please get involved. If you’ve wanted to try your hand at usability testing but have never had the opportunity, here it is. Exciting, huh?

Drupal.org – Prototyping commences!

Progress continues apace on the Drupal.org redesign project – thanks to lots of help from you, we have now moved into the rapid prototyping phase.

In the spirit of this open redesign process, you’re more than welcome to take a look at the prototype as it evolves from its current, very sketchy state to … well, whatever it becomes. Hopefully a great home for the Drupal.org community and their product!

Now, be warned – it’s not pretty and it is far from complete. There are some things we kind of like and plenty we think may be a little dodgy, and some stuff that is just holding a place until we have more time to think on it (or to generate a little feedback in the meanwhile). The visual design (colours, fonts, etc.) of the prototype bears not resemblance to what we imagine the finished Drupal.org website will look like. Some of the content we kind of like, a lot of it is just holding text. It is very much a work in progress!

It’s really all about what’s on the page and what it’s called – lots of information architecture to look at really!

Anyway – enough with the disclaimers – why don’t you go take a look for yourself and, if you’re so inclined, leave any feedback or questions you have in the comments here and it will go into the mix for the next iteration. I’ll let you know when the next version is up for you to take a look, and we’ll continue like that for the next few weeks at least, as we gradually build in all the content and functionality and fine tune the content and interaction.

Drupal.org Prototype Development – Iteration 2