Making Drupal 7 Simple to Use for Everyone
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Making Drupal 7 Simple to Use for Everyone Dries Buytaert Drupal founder, Acquia CTO Acquia @dries Lynne Capozzi Vice President Marketing Acquia @bryanhouse Jeff Noyes Director of User Experience Acquia @jeffnoyes
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Over the past year, the Drupal community has focused on improving the Drupal user experience, making Drupal more friendly to a less technical user-base and rolling those improvements into Drupal 7. Join Dries Buytaert, the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform and Jeff Noyes, Acquia's director of user experience and contributor to the D7UX team contributor, for a one-hour tour of the new Drupal 7 usability features and the driving forces behind them. This will be the first in a series of Drupal 7 Webinars hosted by Dries this year.
Transcript of Making Drupal 7 Simple to Use for Everyone
Making Drupal 7 Simple to Use for Everyone
Dries BuytaertDrupal founder, Acquia CTO
Acquia
@dries
Lynne CapozziVice President Marketing
Acquia
@bryanhouse
Jeff NoyesDirector of User Experience
Acquia
@jeffnoyes
Housekeeping
Can you hear us? Raise your hand in WebExUnable to listen via your computer’s audio– Request phone access
Housekeeping
Today’s webinar is being recorded. Slides and recording will be posted in next 24 hours at:
– http://acquia.com/community/resources/recorded_webinars
Submit questions via WebEx, we’ll answer as many as we can at end
–Give it a try & tell us where you joining from today
Upcoming Webinars
Thursday February 18th
–How Open Source Frameworks for Social Publishing Eliminate WCM Shortfalls
Thursday February 25th- Preview of Drupal Gardens - 15 Minutes from Design
to Online
Register Today - http://acquia.com/webinars
Introduction
Dries Buytaert–Founder and Project Lead, Drupal–President, Drupal Association–Co-founder & CTO, Acquia
Jeff Noyes–Director of User Experience, Acquia
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How did we get here?
Choosing the Right TechnologyA Social Publishing Platform
Drupal “… is as much a Social Software platform as it is a web content management system.” CMS Watch, The Web CMS Report 2009
blogs /wikis
forums / comments
socialranking
social tagging
users
social networks
workflow
taxonomy
semantic web
RSS
content
analytics
ContentMgmtSystems
SocialSoftware
Tools
Overview
Drupal’s perceived as being hard to use.
Usability lab testing
Several formal lab tests between March 2008/2009 conducted to answer these questions...
– What are the main challenges to new Drupal users?
– Is the language and terminology intuitive to users?
– How long does it take users to perform basic web development tasks with no formal Drupal training
– Do recent design changes work (password checker, vertical tabs, etc
Lab test results can’t be ignored
Lots of vernacular confusion Page vs Story, Content vs Content type, Primary Links, etc.
Inability to find content after creating it
Mental model of creating pages not expected
Users expected WYSIWYG vs. “input format”
Unable to distinguish administrative layer
Overwhelming administrative page
Menu confusion with parent item
A usability team is born
Evolving team of 8-16 people join forces to help make Drupal easier. Two people stand out.
Roy Scholten (A.K.A Yoroy) for sound design insights.
Bojhan Summers for staying on top of the issues, rounding up the troops & beating the UX drum.
Acquia hires Mark Boulton
D7ux.org
MicroprojectsOverall information architectureShortcutsMedia managerAppearanceDashboardProfileForumsWatchdogTriggers Pathauto
and more...
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Drupal 7’s user experience goal
Drupal 7’s user experience goals
Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
Design for the 80%
Privilege the Content Creator
Make the default settings smart
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Drupal 7’s usability highlights
Who benefits?
Content Managers–People that spend most of their time
managing content, e.g. writers, editorsetc.
Designers & Developers–People that spend most of their time
building & theming sites.
Usability highlights
Simplifying the content managers role.
Simplified startup optionsUsers can now start with a common set of pre-configured features, or take the advanced route and start from scratch.
Password verify made more clearUsers now have a better experience setting site credentials.
Information architecture ImprovementsMore concrete categories for a clearer map of the Drupal system. - Emphasis on basic CMS tasks (content, structure, people etc) and pushed advance config a layer deeper (80/20)
Appearance
Recently added content made easier to find.Users can now find recently added content by clicking “content”
Appearance
Point-and-click edit.Users can now edit content more quickly and configure blocks more quickly.
ShortcutsAccelerate by creating shortcuts to most used destinations - by role
Add shortcutsQuickly add shortcuts to your most usedlocations.
Admin layer
Overlay...Clear separation of front—and back—end tasks..
Site layer
Sitewide dashboardUsers now have a customizable dashboard.
Clearer content/help textRewrote/removed copy – making Drupal more friendly and concise. Focused on making help more helpful.
D7
D6
Reorganized FormsRedesigned fieldsets and compressed forms by using vertical tabs.
Primary actions separated from tabsAdding content used be in the same location as browsing lists of existing content.
Usability highlights
Designer & developer simplifications.
Redesigned appearanceApplying a theme is now modernized and easier to understand which theme is active
Adding features (modules) workflow improvedModules now have direct links to permissions and configuration settings. Outdated modules can be updated within Drupal.
Clearing cache more accessible.Developers and themers can now clear cache without having to scroll.
Upgrade managerModules with newly released revisions can now be updated without leaving Drupal.
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Drupal Gardens
Built on Drupal 7Built to help people get over the hurdle of installing Drupal and figuring out which modules to use.
WYSIWYGContent can now be formatted
Media supportMedia can be uploaded, reused, or added from third party vendors like Flickr
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Drupal 8 wish list...
More testing & solid metrics
Drupal Gardens will become a platform for user testing and getting access to usage data.
Page improvements
Improve Drupal’s page model
User think about pages top down - add a page, give it a layout, add widgets, add content.
Block improvements
Drag and drop featuresEliminate need to duplicate blocks to place in different regions
Drop here
Module administration improvements
Too much scrolling. Too often you have to click to enable/disable, scroll way down, submit. Repeat.
Easier form creation
Building & styling forms should be easier. Form Builder should be advanced
Content types
Creating content types and managing fields could be improved
Drop here
Interaction Guidelines
Interaction standards should emerge to answer questions like:– Best practice use of:
tabswizardsbuttonsdrag & dropforms & form elementsetc.
– Accessibility standards– Help standards
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Summary
Thanks!
D7 will be a huge step forward!
The Drupal community should be proud of its accomplishments. We’re proud!
If you want to help Drupal get better...
To help Drupal.org...http://drupal.org/node/704062
To help Drupal...http://drupal.org/contribute
We’re Hiring!
Do you love working with Drupal?
If so, Acquia is hiring:–Engineering & design–Client advisors and consulting–Inside sales
Check out openings athttp://acquia.com/careers
Questions
For more information:– http://acquia.com
– http://twitter.com/acquia
– http://twitter.com/drupal
Contact Acquia:– 888.9.ACQUIA
Try Drupal 7 – Sign up for beta code at http://drupalgardens.com
– Download at http://drupal.org/project/drupal
Download Acquia’s Drupal Stack Installers– http://acquia.com/download
– Available for Debian, Ubuntu, Windows & Mac
Recording of today’s event and slideswill be posted at:
http://acquia.com/community/resources/recorded_webinars
