As you may know, I’m working with the Drupal community on a (voluntary) Social Architecture Project called the Prairie Initiative.

We’re looking to tune up Drupal’s collaboration tools so that it’s an easier, more efficient and more collaborative place for all the different disciplines that Drupal needs to be great.

If you’ve got any experience attempting to, considering or actually contributing to Drupal, I’d really appreciate if you’d come take our sentiment survey. We’re taking a benchmark now and will check back every quarter to see if and how any changes we make impact this and some other metrics.

Much appreciated.

I’m taking a couple of surveys to explore our priorities and experiences hiring and being hired as UXers.

If you’re a UXer: Come tell me what you think about when you think about taking a new job.

If you hire UXers:  Here’s a survey for you

This came out of an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day with a colleague who posted a Tweet about job opportunities at his company and promoting the opportunity to work on big brands if you worked with him.

He also has an awesome team working with him. I suggested to him perhaps he should be promoting that as well or instead.

I got to wondering (again) how how other people saw the world – what was important to UXers when they were thinking about a new job and what the process was like for finding, interviewing and taking a new job.

Being a good UXer, it was only logical to take the next step and do some research.

I’ll collate the results and share them back in a few weeks.

Thanks!

I was in Chicago the other week and out with a friend who has multiple, severe dietary allergies. She can’t eat dairy, eggs, wheat, and a bunch of other stuff. Eating out is a bit of a pain for her but, if she doesn’t get it right, a whole lot more pain later.

We were in one of those posh grocery stores with its own little cafe and, after much deliberation, decided what to eat. The girl who was taking our order had a desk that was positioned in a way that made it easy for me to look over her shoulder at the interface she was using to take the order.

Taking a standard order was pretty easy – you just pressed the button that said ‘thai chicken salad’. Simple.

Then it came time to take my friend’s order. First she had to press the button that said ‘thai chicken salad’ and then my friend asked that she make a special note for the chef about her allergies. To do this, the girl had to press the notes button and then type the special request in. No assistance from the UI whatsoever. And that’s when the trouble struck. Spelling.

Without wanting to ridicule her – she failed to spell ‘dairy’ even to the point that you might guess what she intended. There was no way she was ever going to accurately convey my friends requirements to the chef. I watched, quietly, as she tried and failed to type the instructions and eventually sent the following note through to the chef:

‘eg’

Here’s the thing. Our order taker is far from an edge case. Jonathan Kozol has written extensively about illiteracy in the US (and there are similar problems in many parts of the world). He says:

Twenty-five million American adults cannot read the poison warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter from their child’s teacher, or the front page of a daily paper. An additional 35 million read only at a level which is less than equal to the full survival needs of our society.

Together, these 60 million people represent more than one third of the entire adult population.

The largest numbers of illiterate adults are white, native-born Americans. In proportion to population, however, the figures are higher for blacks and Hispanics than for whites. Sixteen percent of white adults, 44 percent of blacks, and 56 percent of Hispanic citizens are functional or marginal illiterates. Figures for the younger generation of black adults are increasing. Forty-seven percent of all black seventeen-year olds are functionally illiterate. That figure is expected to climb to 50 percent by 1990.

Fifteen percent of recent graduates of urban high schools read at less than sixth grade level. One million teenage children between t velve and seventeen percent cannot read above the third grade level. Eighty-five percent of juveniles who come before the courts are functionally illiterate. Half the heads of households classified below the poverty line by federal standards cannot read an eighth grade book. Over one third of mothers who receive support from welfare are functionally illiterate. Of 8 million unemployed adults, 4 to 6 million lack the skills to be retrained for hi-tech jobs. (more here)

This is a big problem. This is not an edge case. And, before you say it, the answer is not icons. (The number of times people have told me that the solution to designing for an illiterate audience is icons. Now make me an icon for ‘vegan’).

I don’t have the solution, but I do have a couple of guiding thoughts.

• People are better at recognising words than they are at making them from scratch. My 3yr old can recognise words in books that he is familiar with but he can’t read (no matter what he tells you). This is true for all of us. Recognition is far easier than recall. Think about foreign languages – most of us can read a lot more than we can speak, right?
• Think about mission critical tasks. Things that, if not done right, could hurt people or have significant negative impact on people or business. Don’t give people a blank box to fill in when you’re designing these tasks. Give options (in words, not icons). Let people recognise and select, don’t make them remember how to spell stuff.

Jan Chipchase has done a lot of design research work with Nokia in the area of device design for illiterate end users and supports the view that making the interface easy to ‘learn’ (which largely means ‘remember’ for people who are less literate), is the best approach – better than icons or audio menus or all other apparently obvious solutions.

This presentation is worth a flip through if you’re interested in his experience and outcomes.

None of this is new, granted. But it’s not something I hear us talking about anywhere near enough. Watching that poor girl struggle with that interface and because of the poor design put my friend’s health at risk was a real wake up call and reminder to me of how wide-spread and significant this issue is.

I’m resolving to be more aware of this in the future and I hope you will to.

(And, if you’re in the UK, consider signing the Save Bookstart petition – this invaluable service puts books into the hands of young children – having books in the house in childhood is a key indicator of later literacy).

I’m excited to be making a start on my current contribution to Drupal which to help drive a project code named Prairie. This is a project with two big, ambitious goals:

1. to improve the collaboration tools on Drupal.org so that we can do more and better work together and make Drupal better, faster.

2. to make Drupal.org a better and easier place to become a contributor – to make it less intimidating to people who want to get started contributing to Drupal, coders and non-coders. To increase the number of Drupal.org members who are actively contributing and to recognise a wider range of contributions.

This started out as a ‘Redesign the Issue Queue’ core conversation at Drupalcon in Chicago, but rapidly increased in scope so that it’s now really more accurately described as a Social Architecture project.

For those amongst us who are actively contributing Drupallers, comfortable with the Drupal Groups infrastructure, there’s a group you can join and contribute to.

For those who find the Groups Infrastructure perplexing or just plain frustrating (and you can count me among that number – you’ll find Groups Usability as part of the scope for this project), I’m going to try to keep you up to speed here and I’m experimenting with sharing some screenshots that we can annotate together… we’ll see how well that works – at any rate, I do want to try to open the discussion up outside of the Groups infrastructure so that we’re not just a bunch of insiders talking amongst ourselves.

The issue page – Designing a tool to fit the task

So the first thing I’d love for you to give some attention to are some initial ideas on redesigning the Issue template.

The ideas in this rough wireframe draw heavily from Quora and Open Ideo and try to address opportunities for us to make our discussion more comprehensible and focussed, as well as to make sure that they move through the stages of problem solving (possibly with custom designed interfaces for the specific requirements of each phase) to make it easier to ‘call in the troops’ from the various disciplines when they’re required and also to create spaces that are more appropriate for each discipline in turn (rather than all trying to squash our requirements into the one UI). It also introduces the concept of collaboratively naming an issue and providing a summary for it.

You can take a look and provide your feedback on this wireframe and these ideas here (or in the group if you prefer).

For those who are wondering, no, I’m not being paid to do this work. I’m a freelancer, so I have to take time off consulting, playing with my kids or sleeping to do this work.

I’d happily take sponsorship to do so though, if you think the work is important enough for me to be able to dedicate more of my time to working on it. Let me know if you’re interested.