disambiguity

Drupal7 UX Project – Crowdsourcing Usability Testing. Get Involved!

If you took a look at our outline for the project process the other day, you’ll know that we’re taking an iterative and user centered approach to this project. That means that at regular intervals through out the project, as well as doing all this online stuff, we’re also going to sit down with real people in ‘real life’ and let them use our design work while we observe them and make notes about what is working well and what requires improvement. This is sometimes known as Usability Testing.

Now, Mark & I are going to be doing a bunch of this ourselves, and our friends in the Drupal Usability Group are also going to be helping out as much as they can (thank you!), and Jeff at Acquia will also be helping out – but (as we did with the d.o redesign), we’d like to invite YOU to help out with some usability testing as well!

Why on earth would you want to do this?

As I see it, there are three main reasons why you’d get involved in something like this:

1. you’d like to get some (or some more!) experience in usability testing. This is an opportunity get some experience under your belt, or find out what doing usability testing is like. You may have students or interns who need to get some experience, here’s a great project to keep them busy AND use their time to contribute to a great project.
2. you want to see for yourself how other people interact with the design. One of the main reasons that we do usability testing is that it is very easy to design for ourselves and often incredibly difficult to design for other people. People come to Drupal with all kinds of backgrounds and understandings, and very often what is clear as day for us is impossible to understand for them. (See the video we posted of Mark & I installing Drupal for some evidence to this point).
3. you love Drupal and this project and you desperately want to see it succeed: one of the key ways to reduce the risk of failure of this project is to get it out in front of people and see what they make of it. Not only does this ensure that we’re not designing and releasing something that is broken and unusable, it makes us feel confident that the decisions we are making are the right ones and that they will have a significant and positive impact on the user experience of Drupal.

As we move forward with this redesign and start to make some concrete decisions, we are going to have some tough discussions about ‘what users do’ – the BEST way to have these discussions is with *real* experience of our future end users, and not just sweeping statements about users in general. Help us build up that body of knowledge and inform yourself in the process.

How will it work?

As you can imagine, we don’t do this kind of thing every day. We tried this on the d.o redesign project and whilst lots of people voiced interest, the only person who actually did any testing was me! However, we still think this is a good idea and we suspect that, with a little more structure and a fixed schedule, it might work. So, here’s the current plan:

• one week before Test Time we will release a description of the audience type(s) that will be appropriate for this round of testing. You should then recruit as many people who fit that description as you think you will have the time and/or inclination to interview/test. You should allow around an hour for each interview, but don’t schedule more than 4 or 5 in a day (trust me, your brain will melt and you will make a LOT of data to analyse)
• a few days before Test Time we will release:
  • the Prototype that you will be using to test (starting off with PDF/Paper prototypes and moving onto web-based interactive prototypes as the project continues).
  • an Interview Guide that you will base your interview on, listing all the key tasks and issues we want you to cover in the interview
• During Test Time (or as close to it as you can) you conduct your interviews. If you can (please!) record your interviews on video and post either the entire video or some highlights from it to the YouTube Group (or elsewhere if you prefer). We will also provide a place for you to log your test findings (TBC, we’re looking at a few options here, ping me if you have suggestions!)
• We will then include your findings in our analysis of the design work to date and use it to inform our design decisions going forward.

The Testing Schedule:

We have penciled in some dates for ‘Testing Time’ throughout the project… these are subject to change, but if you are thinking of participating, perhaps see if one or more of these dates works for you:

• 6-8 April
• 15-16 April
• 27-29 April
• 18-20 May
• 1-3 June
• 29 June – 1 July

Need more help?

Over the coming weeks I’ll post some more information that will help provide support for those who aren’t seasoned researchers. Things I’m thinking of posting include: tips for a good interview, tips for recruiting, suggested software/hardware for recording/editing sessions… can you think of anything else that would be helpful?

Thank you!

I’m really excited about this exercise and I hope you are too. Please leave a note below if you’re interested in participating or if you have any questions, need more information, have any feedback on the proposed process. If you know of people in schools or companies who might be interested in participating, please send this on to them!

I really look forward to working with you on this!

Leisa

X-Posted from: d7ux.org/crowd-source-usability-testing/

More from Disambiguity

• Drupal.org – Crowdsourcing Usability Testing – Get Involved!
• Drupal7 UX – Project Process
• Drupal7 UX Project – Come Wireframe With Us!
• Understanding our Audience (Part 1) – Drupal7 UX Project
• D7UX User Research & Usability Testing – Proposed Approach

Drupal7 UX Project – Come Wireframe With Us!

At the beginning of this project we invited you to do a ’show and tell’ of anything you’ve done to a Drupal Admin System that you think we should pay attention to – anything from a customised administration system, to a better view of content, to an in-line editing tool – whatever you think we should see. Happily, we’ve seen a few people participate and some interesting concept. (You can see some of there on our YouTube group).

You may also remember a little exercise we did for the Drupal.org project where we invited anyone to submit a wireframe of a page they though needed some attention and what they’d do to it (you can see the original post here)…

well… now is the time for us to bring that all together and to kick off ‘Pimp Your *Imaginary* Admin’ for the D7UX project!

Here’s how it works:

1. pick *something* or *somewhere* in Drupal admin that you think is particularly in need of love
2. get out your pen, pencil, visio, powerpoint, whatever works best for you (I’d encourage you to consider pencil!)
3. sketch out how you think it *should* work.
4. post your sketch(s) somewhere we can see them – the Flickr group is ideal for this if you’re a Flickr member (or inclined to become one) but if you post it on your own site, or wherever you share pictures and link to it in the comments below we will *definitely* take a look.
5. this is optional but we would consider you most excellent if you do it – take a short movie of your sketch(es) and talk us through them. Your movie should include: a) a statement of the problem – what are you fixing? what is currently wrong with it? b) an overview of your solution – how it works, why it solves the problem. Post the movie to YouTube and add it to our YouTube Group (again, same applies here, if you’d rather post it elsewhere, just link to it in comments below and we’ll make sure it gets looked at!)you can see a kind-of example of what your video might look like in the prototype walk-thru we do around 3 mins into this video.

Remember:

• go fast! Don’t spend too long on it – try to spend no more than a few minutes on a wireframe. If you’re not happy with it (and you probably won’t be at first!) just put it to one side and start fresh. You don’t want to labour over them too much at this stage.
• you don’t have to be good at drawing: just take a quick browser through the images on the Flickr group if you want to get a sense of how un-pretty our wireframes usually are (particularly mine!). They’re not meant to be pretty, they’re meant to communicate. Even if they don’t do that, we have the video Don’t be shy.
• everyone’s invited (not just ‘designers’) – Don’t think you have to be a designer or a UX person to participate in this exercise – this is all hands on deck. If you’re not an experience Drupal user or designer, you may actually be at an advantage in this exercise!

Really, really, really looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Let me know if you have any questions.

X-posted from: www.d7ux.org/pimp-your-imaginary-admin/

More from Disambiguity

• Drupal7 UX – Project Process
• Drupal7 UX Project – Crowdsourcing Usability Testing. Get Involved!
• Drupal.org – come wireframe with me!
• Drupal7 UX – We Need You NOW!
• Help make Drupal7 amazing – what we’re doing at Drupalcon

Drupal7 UX – Project Process

As you may have noticed, this is not your typical design project… there are things about it that are pretty unusual, but there are also some pretty standard aspects as well. We thought it might be useful to give you a high level view of the approach we plan to take.

On a project like this, however, a highlevel view is really the only one we *can* give because, in all honesty, we’re not exactly sure what we’ll be doing in 2-3 weeks time let alone 2-3 months time. We have a mud-map though, and this is roughly what it looks like.

We are working with the team at Acquia on this project and they run an Agile shop, so we’re going to be trying to synch into their iterations as best we can.

One of the biggest challenges for User Experience and Design work in an Agile environment is getting the strategy and vision of the design worked through – to that end we are very thankful that our friends at Acquia have been flexible enough to give us a nice big chunk of time which we’re calling ‘Iteration Zero‘ and in this time we are doing a whole load of thinking, and strategising and talking with you to work out what our overall strategy is. This is why we’re asking about audience, and tone of voice and those more ‘abstract’ questions.

By the end of Iteration Zero, which for us is around 14 April, we hope to have an overarching strategy and ‘framework’ for the proposed interface for D7 in the form of some pencil sketches and a sitemap, an agreed experience strategy, audience matrix and tone of voice. We will have tested framework using some low fidelity (paper) prototypes with a range of participants across the spectrum of our audience matrix and we will feel confident that we know what we are doing and where we are headed.

During this time we will be working closely with the Drupal community to understand *how* our framework can best be implemented for release with D7.

The remainder of our time on the project, (which runs until around the end of July) will be spent working through exactly how the strategy is implemented, looking at the very many fine details and issues that will need to be resolved, whilst also testing and iterating the work we have done based on the results of our testing.

How and when can you get involved?

During iteration zero – it is VITAL that we get the foundations of our strategy correct so please engage and continue to engage with us as we work through the strategy, audience and tone issues. This will be mostly in the form of you reviewing what we’ve come up with and providing us with your feedback.

Get involved with the framework design – we’re going to be posting (very soon) some initial sketches that show the direction we’re heading in – we would love to have your feedback on that.

As we did with the d.o redesign project, we’ll be doing a CrowdSourced Wireframe activity that we would invite you to participate in where we’ll be asking you to take a part of the Drupal Admin you think needs work and drawing up a solution (or, if you’ve done it already, why not submit a screencast to ‘Pimp Your Admin’ on our YouTube channel!)

We are also going to re-launch the Crowdsourced Usability Testing for this project – this time with a little more warning and some more structure – so we would invite you to help us test our designs with people around you and contribute to our understanding of what is working and what is not, and help validate our approach. In the coming week I will be releasing a lot more information around this, including some timings, so it would be great to have you on board with this exercise (and it would also make a great exercise for interns, students, people new to usability/UX who want to get some experience doing usability testing).

As the Acquia team start to take designs from us, they will also start releasing a working prototype that you will be able to review and comment on – I’m not sure on timings for that but I’d expect probably mid-late May (I’ll update when I know more).

So as you can see – there will be LOTS of ways for you to contribute all the way through the project, and, don’t let us limit you! If you have ideas we need to see, or other ways you’d like to contribute – please let us know!

Any questions? Comments etc.?

X-Posted from: d7ux.org/project-process/

More from Disambiguity

• Drupal7 UX Project – Come Wireframe With Us!
• Drupal7 UX Project – Crowdsourcing Usability Testing. Get Involved!
• Understanding our Audience (Part 1) – Drupal7 UX Project
• UX Suggestion Box – Drupal7 UX
• Drupal7 UX – We Need You NOW!

Why is D7UX.org on WordPress (not Drupal?)

You may have noticed that this is a WordPress blog. Both the D7UX and the Disambiguity blogs run WordPress. Mark Boulton Design uses Expression Engine. Since we first started working with Drupal there have been questions (and the occasional shout of #fail) that we continue to use these platforms and haven’t switched to Drupal.

Don’t we know Drupal can do all that WordPress can do and more?! Don’t we love Drupal?!

Well, yes and yes. We know Drupal is amazing and we love it (well, more to the point, we love the people all around Drupal), but unfortunately, for the time being, it is too broken for us to be able to do the work we need to do on this project at the pace that we need to do it. We don’t have time to ‘learn’ Drupal, nor the skills to bend it to our will (and make it look acceptably pretty), we can’t even get a blog post on the homepage (as you’ll see in the videos that follow the installation video about which I’ll post as soon as they finally make it up to YouTube).

We appreciate all the offers of porting this blog over to Drupal, but to be honest, I really like using WordPress and nothing I’ve seen of Drupal makes me want to switch over at the moment.

See, I love the *idea* of Drupal, but the sooner we all agree that from a User Experience perspective it is horribly broken and concentrate on FIXING that, the better it will be. Admitting this doesn’t make us Drupal Haters, far from it. It just makes us honest and informed. After all, we use a whole raft of tools to make and administer websites all the time – we actually have a pretty good perspective to be making this call.

If we didn’t *really* care about making Drupal amazing, we wouldn’t start difficult conversations like these ones. And there is a big reason why one of the key success criteria for this project is that once this project is done Mark & I will *want* to switch from WordPress and Expression Engine to Drupal.

And what of ‘eating our own dogfood?’ – well, again, back to that success criteria of Mark & I using Drupal once the new UX is implemented. If we’re not using Drupal then, I’m happy to be called on this. For now, the fact that we are NOT entrenched Drupal users is actually a great advantage to us, rather than a disadvantage. It gives us perspective, distance from the project that allows us to see things differently, to challenge accepted ideas and approaches, to re-hash conversations that have been had a thousand times already and have them a little differently. It helps us not see that things might be impossible (and, at this stage of the project, that’s a good thing).

We’re not entirely ignorant of Drupal, not at all. And becoming less so every day. And we are surrounded by an incredibly informed and amazingly helpful community who give us *way* more help coming to terms with Drupal than the average ‘newcomer’ would have.

We know that Drupal is not Wordpress, and we have no intention of making it so, but using Wordpress helps us get our work done faster and easier for the time being, and it helps us maintain perspective and distance – and for now those things are really important to us.

But if, this time next year, this blog isn’t running on Drupal and if it doesn’t look amazing – then please come and shout #fail as loudly as you can. Because then you’ll be completely right, we will have failed.

Let’s not do that. Let’s make Drupal amazing.

And thanks so much to everyone who has come on board and started to help shape D7UX by responding to our initial Experience Strategy, Audience Matrix and Personality Quiz. The feedback has been incredible and insightful. We’ll have more for you to look at soon!

Related:

• Video: Leisa & Mark try to choose a theme for their Drupal 7 Site
• Video: Leisa & Mark try to publish an article on their Drupal 7 Site

Re-posted from d7ux.org/why-is-this-on-wordpress/

More from Disambiguity

• Drupal.org – Initial thoughts on the Information Architecture
• Drupal.org redesign – why is it so? Some insights into our design strategies.
• Why Drupal needs a Design Community Manager
• DRAFT: Drupal.org Experience Strategy
• less is not enough

Drupal7UX – How does Drupal talk? (on brand, personality and tone of voice)

So, there we were, just starting to work through the workflow for Drupal – we got as far as the login screen when we thought ‘let’s write something nice on this screen’, and, pen poised… we were stumped.

We wanted to write something friendly like Moo would. Or Innocent drinks. We wanted to make it visually interesting like Vimeo do. Or Picnik. But… is that Drupal?

We realised we have no idea what Drupal’s personality is. And it would make our lives much easier, and help make a much better User Experience, if we can work out what it is.

Isn’t this completely touchy-feely and a waste of time?

Well no. One way or another, words will go on screens and a personality will emerge. Or, worse still, a few personalities, or a few dozen personalities. Much better that we spend a little time and give a little thought and see what we can come up with.

So, here’s where you come in:

The Personality Exercise:

Take a minute to v quickly answer the following five questions. Go with your gut reaction, don’t over think it. Try not to read everyone elses’ responses first. Don’t worry about being silly! (This is a kind of silly exercise after all, albeit useful)

• If Drupal was an animal, what would it be?
• If Drupal was a celebrity, who would it be?
• If Drupal was a car, what would it be?
• If Drupal was a profession/career what would it be?

So your answers might look something like this:

Drupal would be a squirrel/Paris Hilton/SS Commodore Ute/Teacher*

Get to it – what do you reckon?

*the opinions expressed above are not those of the author. Except for the SS Commodore one.

More from Disambiguity

• Why is D7UX.org on WordPress (not Drupal?)
• Drupal.org – more thoughts on the Information Architecture (Part 1 – Projects, Downloads etc.)
• Tone of voice matters (show some respect)
• Practical Solutions for the (lack of) Women in Tech issue
• Drupal7UX – The Audience Matrix Evolves (and you can play at home!)

Drupal7 UX – We Need You NOW!

We plan to make the Drupal 7 User Experience something very special.
The biggest risk to this project is community rejection/involvement too late in the project.

Get out of the issue queues, quit bitching about your other CMS tools.

Come reject our ideas NOW not later!

Get over here and help us make something amazing.

Thank you! (and even bigger thanks to those who are already involved)!

More from Disambiguity

• UX London Tweets – Peter Merholz
• Come to UX London!
• UX London Tweets – Eric Reiss
• wish you were here (at BarCamp London)
• UX London Tweets – Dan Saffer

Drupal7UX – The Audience Matrix Evolves (and you can play at home!)

Over the past week or so Mark and I have been working out the details that go on the panels of the Audience Matrix  that we shared with you last week (or dress-up-doll document as it has otherwise been named).  We’ve made a few changes and added a bunch of definitions.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

ROLES:

• Content Creator: a user who primarily creates, reviews, and edits content for a site. Key tasks: Add  content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks.
• Site Editor: a user who has authority to approve, edit or reject content and who may be able to manage some editorial workflow and user permissions. Key tasks: Add  content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks, review content, reject/feedback on content to original author, schedule content,
• Site Admin: manage user permissions, manage site structure, adding new content types, create and review reports and manage some site settings (RSS Publishing, IP Address Blocking). Key tasks: Manage user permissions, Add / Edit / Delete Content Types, Manage Information Architecture (site sections, sub-sections, taxonomy (as in, vocabulary), Create a report, Review a report.
• Site Builder: creates site from scratch by choosing, writing, customising modules and/or themes, manages setup and maintenance. Is a developer (for the purposes of audience definition, themers are considered developers). Key Tasks: Develop site functionality, implement site design.

question: who can/should be able to create new content types? who can create new site sections and subsections (vocabulary and/or terms)   etc.

TYPE OF SITE:

• Brochureware Site: hierarchical structure of relatively static content, often includes forms (eg. contact/feedback), may be multi-author
• Blog: sequence of chronological posts that may be assigned to categories, may also include ‘fixed’ pages, often includes comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, most often single author
• News: a categorical/hierarchical grouping of content usually ordered chronologically but often ‘curated’ by an editorial team, may also include  comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, often multi-author, often requires multiple templates
• Events: a combination of content supporting an event, including content about the event, a schedule/calendar of events, list of participants,  online registration, may also require online submissions, social networking functionality, news, email update list
• Social Site: comprises member profiles and communication between those member in the form of discussion forums, wikis, events, blogs, require member signup, subscription, RSS,

NO. OF USERS

• 1 : no permissions, no workflow, that user does everything (one stop shop) BUT most like to have simple requirements (how manage giving access to all functionality when the mostly won’t need it). Likely to generate small amounts of content.
• 2-5 : multiple authors, may require permissions, may require workflow (simple approval process), may require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks but usually not overly complicated requirements.
• 6-15: multiple authors and editors, likely to require permissions, likely to require workflow, likely to require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks may have some complex requirements, will have significant amount of content generated.
• 15+ : requires permission management (several permission profiles), probably requires workflow (content review/approval), likely to generate a lot of content to be managed and require content scheduling – it’s a complicated machine and it needs a whole section around managing the machine, let alone making the content to feed the machine. Involves a lot of content and likely complex taxonomy.

question: should it matter how much ‘experience’ you have with Drupal? Should we add another row for this? (Insider/Midsider/Outsider) – we can’t decide. One one level it seems like it does matter, but we also think that it shouldn’t matter… would adding this add unnecessary complexity? (For the time being we’re leaving this out).

PLAY ALONG AT HOME!

This is going to be a pretty instrumental tool for us on this project and we’ll be referring to it regularly. If you’re interested in checking it out in more detail or if you’d like to get more involved in this project, the perhaps you’d like your very own copy. Yes? Well, you’re in luck because you can now download a copy here: Audience Matrix PDF

HOW TO USE THE MATRIX:

Over the coming weeks we’re going to be inviting you to submit your ideas for revisions to the Drupal7 Admin interface and overall user experience. It will be very helpful for us all to use this document to help make sure that we’re designing for the 80% and not necessarily just for ourselves! And it is also a really great way to expose missing elements and possible flaws in our concepts. Using the document to test the example we show in the video above helped us to realise that we needed things like a close button on the dashboard (I know, d’uh!), a place to hold the user generated content from things like comment as well as contact forms, and got us thinking about a whole host of thorny permissions and workflow issues. (Don’t get me started!)

This is, however, a living document – we welcome your feedback and questions on the changes we’ve made and how we’re using it – so, please – let us have it!  (but don’t pay too much heed to the concept we’ve presented as an example in the video, it is very early days and it’s just one of many ideas we’re working on.)

More from Disambiguity

• Designing for the wrong target audience (or why Drupal should be a developer tool and not a consumer product)
• Drupal.org – Initial thoughts on the Information Architecture
• D7UX Update: Initial Concepts, Design Principles and a question for you
• Why Drupal needs a Design Community Manager
• Openness and Effectiveness in Designing with a Community

Ada Lovelace Day – Rachel Dixon

With apparently thousands of others, I recently made the following pledge:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

I’d like to open with a hat-tip to Suw Charman-Anderson for actually doing something about the Women In Technology (or lack there-of) issue. Well done Suw. May we all be as constructive and proactive as you have been with this initiative.

The woman in technology I’d like to pay tribute to today is Rachel Dixon, who I was fortunate enough to work with several years ago, and who today, I consider to be a friend and mentor. It says something about Rachel that the only options I have to link to her are a LinkedIn profile and a holding page for her consulting company. Rachel, you see, is mostly too busy making other people look good (or, more to the point make smart decisions) to have time with self-promotion.

I first met Rachel when she joined the interactive agency I was working at as the Managing Director. Rachel is brings what I think is a truly magical mix of experience and insight to discussion about technology in business or the public sector – she has a strong understanding of technology (current and potential future), respect for and engagement with creativity and design and strong business sensibilities.

After a brief dabble with architecture, much of Rachel’s work was as a Producer in the film industry. In more recent years, many an interactive employee has been given the title ‘producer’ but I think that, particularly from the  business side of things, interactive producers could learn a lot from our film counterparts and the tricky path they walk between the competing demands of the creative genius and the investors.

Rachel has since extended her reach into technology, particularly web based technology and, although she may not be a ‘rock star’ on the interactive scene, her influence extends far beyond the bounds that many of more public players. Rachel is, I think, the only woman I know who declines dinner invitations because she has board meetings to attend. I probably should have interviewed her in advance of writing this post, but off hand I know that she has been a board member of AIMIA (the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association) and Choice (the consumer advocate) for some time – I’m sure there are many others among this. She’s always involved in one committee or another either advising or lobbying the Australian Federal Government to act sensibly with regards to the internet (and goodness knows they need it!). Rachel is acting at a level that many of us only aspire to and others of us know we’ll never quite be up to!

For myself, I have long since abandoned any hope of achieving such a broadranging expertise myself, but it has been inspirational to have been in such close quarters with someone who can really hold their own in each of these three quite different arenas.

It is hard for me to quantify what it is that I have learned from working with and knowing Rachel. In some ways, some of insights she has given me are tiny little, almost-self-obvious nuggets. One that I think about probably at least once a week is to think about the medium I’m using to communicate – don’t default to email. Don’t underestimate the power of the telephone, or better still, meeting in person.

For better or worse, it was through Rachel that I first found myself speaking at a conference – doing an appalling job of trying to squeeze 30 minutes of content into 10 minutes on a panel, but also meeting some incredible people and (obviously) getting a little hooked on the experience.

On the grander scale though, Rachel’s confidence in herself and those around her, and her willingness to engage in such a comprehensive way with the challenges she takes on for herself, and perhaps even her inability to say ‘no’, has been and continues to be an inspiration. So, from me and from the others that I know you’ve similarly touched, thank you! I sincerely hope we have the opportunity to work together again in the future.

ALSO: if I were going to

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• Client-Centred Research
• Guerrilla Research – Recruitment
• chicks & conferences downunder – the conversation continues
• Checking in from SXSW
• Hooray! Google Calendar! (you made my day)

Drupal.org update – staging site

Over the last few months of last year you have have seen or, hopefully, engaged with the project to redesign the Drupal.org website.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted an update, but I’m really excited to say that despite the quiet here, the Drupal community have been busy working on the new site and it is really starting to come together beautifully.

Want to check it out? You can find it over on the staging server at staging.dosprint.org – the username and password are “demo” (not sure exactly why it’s protected, but, nevermind.

There’s still lots of work to do, but we’re really happy with how it is looking and really impressed that the community has been able to pull together and get so far with the work so quickly – well done all! We look forward to seeing it get closer to going live.

More from Disambiguity

• Help redesign drupal.org
• Drupal.org redesign project – iteration 5 for your review!
• Drupal.org redesign – Participate in Usability Testing in London!
• Drupal.org redesign – Cardsorting Module Categories
• Drupal.org – What we learned from the Community Wireframing Project

Drupal7UX – Pimp Your Admin

You might remember we mentioned that we were going to kick off an activity we call ‘Pimp Your Admin’ at the recent Drupalcon conference – we have a few interesting screencasts already and now we’d like to invite you to join in!

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can bend it to your will – get it to do just about anything you need it to do. Same goes for it’s administration interface (admin).

Before we get to work on the Drupal7 Admin, we’d love to see what you out there have done to make the Drupal Admin System do what you need it to do, or just to work better for you and your project.

Here’s how we want to do it – simply take a little screencast, it seems to take us about six or seven minutes – and walk us through your admin system and show us what you’ve done, even if it’s just something tiny – to make Drupal work better for you.

You can check out some examples that others have done at the Drupal7UX YouTube Group then once you’ve recorded yours, upload it and post it to the group so we can take a look. (Of course, if you’d rather host it elsewhere, you can just leave a link to your preferred location in the comments below (thanks Brandonian, we’ve got a note of yours!)

We’re really looking forward to seeing your work and to see if some interesting trends start to emerge!

update: for those who ask, we’ve been using Silverback to record our screencasts. If you’re a Mac user and interested in User Experience you should have Silverback. It’s great and ridiculously affordable.

More from Disambiguity

• share your OPML?
• considering code (your help needed)
• Drupal7 UX Project – Come Wireframe With Us!
• Help make Drupal7 amazing – what we’re doing at Drupalcon
• Client-Centred Research