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? :)