I suggest reaching out to university HCI, interaction design and other programs. It is as a master’s student in HCI at the University of Michigan that I first started working with Drupal! First, it needs to be clear and easy how one joins the ux Drupal team that Bojhan Somers speaks of. I for one do not know (though I was able to easily join the d7ux project…)

Building a UX community around Drupal is not going to be easy (has any open source project really been able to engage with this community?) My hunch is that it will require a different framework than the one used by developers.

Point taken. Enough.

Usability enhancements has been done by the community and is being done by the community. Just like the 30 roles example cited by Dries you can hire externally teams for Features, Marketing etc.

The problem here has been acceptance with those who are doing the so-called usability runs. Instead of bashing someone or some people with passion about Drupal it is worth thinking “How usable and user*friendly* this team has been”?

If they have been user-friendly users would not have been upset. Period.

The changes made in Drupal.org website were long suggested and very prominent issues. It is the competition from other CMSes that Drupal had to sit up, take a note and made these changes. IMHO this has very little to do with the so called UI team so far!
As far as the Growth contributed by this team to Drupal the CMS, statistics is not yet out as Drupal 7 have not been released and the growth which we see or which is continuing are due to Drupal 5 and 6, which have no significant contributions from this team.

I hope my opinion is published. Any attack is welcome.

I think it was wise to remove the reference to Views.

Have you seen Jeff Eaton’s SimpleViews module, that puts a simplified UI on top of the regular Views API? It is really interesting, and shows how complex things in Drupal can be simplified, while still maintaining the full power (and complexity) of Drupal functionality, such as View.

http://drupal.org/project/simpleviews

Be sure to see Eaton’s video demo of SimpleViews, which is here:

http://www.lullabot.com/blog/simpleviews-demo

That distillation is called “Datamining” and there are professionals who can do that for you. That distillation can be a new way of usability testing too.

The first thing in usability is you need stuffs that you can use. Unless there are features that you can compete with competitor CMSes what UI are you building ? The two are integrated.

“listening” means responding and solving the problem. When you have listened to a complaint means you are taking care of that or have taken care of that. It is idiomatic English and sorry I forgot idioms are not for everyone.

Here’s an “authoritative distillation” you asked for – with your five years experience you please develop UI or whatever needed to solve this :

1. UI to hide your online status or decide to show them at will. Either it is on for all users or it is off for all users.
2. Abuse control – The Abuse module has threshold set to hide content when say, for example, 10 users report against a content it is supposed to get hidden. Now if you have Views ( a plugin to build up topic lists and display) the hidden topic still shows up. The two plugins or modules do not talk to each other.
3. Blocking an user -UI to block a single user completely
4. RSS – the site admin cannot put off RSS. The users have no choice top put on or off RSS of their own posts. UI needed.
5. No decent image gallery. UI needed so that users can do it easily.
6. Out of the box Social Profile like Buddypress, Elgg or Dolphin Boonex – users are seeking this most common user to user interface.

7. MULTIPLE BLOGS per user – you can configure Wordpress MU to have as many blogs as an user wants. This is simply impossible in Drupal

8. Search – A good php based search that does not leave me scurrying for Java

9.

10.

9, 10 I leave for you. And you are free not scratch

I’d really love to see lots more less formal usability testing done. I have to say that I am a big fan of ‘observational’ testing because I’ve found the richness of the insight you get to be so much greater, but having said that the best way to do that is by going to where your participants work and doing the testing in their own environment (which is something I do all the time) – even doing two or three quick but highly focussed tests will give amazing insight.

Online is also, as you say, an approach that we could be using a lot more than we have to date and it would provide very valuable insight.

My dream is that, just as we are now starting to include a screenshot of the UI with a submitted patch, we will in the future be also able to reference video clips of ‘before and after’ – so we can see evidence of how and why people are struggling and also that the proposed design is actually effective.

And I don’t think that’s as pie in the sky as it sounds… if we had someone to coordinate and direct the efforts (hence the original post!)

(and yes, I really should get both comment previewing and ability to subscribe without commenting added to my blog… it is on my to do list!)

I don’t know how many people over the years have ask me what contributed modules I’m using to get the functions they see in my site. In many of these cases I’m only using core modules and maybe a few snips of code in the blocks. Sure Views can help you achieve your goals a lot quicker, but to use Views effectively understanding of Drupal and it’s data structure should be a prerequisite.

I think for more advanced Drupal modules (Views, CCK, etc) the test audience really should have some Drupal experience but not be developers nor Drupal fanatics.

Leisa, by the way, most UI testing I’ve seen always has people at a testing location being watch. Has there ever been efforts to test remotely? I would think if off location uesr’s screen could be recorded and sent to usability teams…that would open the door to the larger Drupal.org audience (as well as save on expenses).

-Bryan

(By the way, would be nice to be able to preview my comments before submitting them).