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disambiguity

pretty design pending

Drupal.org redesign - why is it so? Some insights into our design strategies.December 4 2008

Over the past few days I’ve been posting a lot in the Drupal Groups at Drupal.org about the rationale for some of the design decisions we have taken on the Drupal.org redesign. I thought you might find them interesting, so I’ll copy them over here as well.

In particular we’re talking about why the header is so big, the global navigation is so small, search is so prominent, the ‘dashboard’ tabs are more prominent than the global header and why there is no ‘download now’ link on the homepage.

I can’t guarantee that the rationale is entirely holeproof, however it has definitely been based on paying close attention to what a broad range of people want to do on Drupal.org, making some decisions around how to best prioritise these needs, designing to suit these prioritised needs and then testing to check that the new design does actually support key user tasks.

There is one fatal flaw in this version of the redesign and that is that we accidentally left off the big ‘Get Started’ call to action from the homepage… d’uh! (Definitely one of the downsides of designing at speed to fit into weekly iterations is that these kinds of oversights can happen - thankfully the Drupal community let us know about it quick smart!)

You can see the

Drupal.org redesign - a strategy for the documentation sectionNovember 19 2008

Leisa Reichelt:15:36:39 ok. here’s the theory Leisa Reichelt:15:36:49 drupal documentation is essentially like wikipedia Leisa Reichelt:15:36:53 lots of pages Leisa Reichelt:15:36:59 it’s not hierarchical Leisa Reichelt:15:37:06 because it is grouped around so many things Leisa Reichelt:15:37:14 so doing a hierarchical IA for it is nonsense Leisa Reichelt:15:37:23 will only show how complex it is and where it is incomplete Leisa Reichelt:15:37:25 which we want to avoid Leisa Reichelt:15:37:30 hence our emphasis on search Mark Boulton:15:37:32 yep - agree with that Leisa Reichelt:15:37:44 ok, that’s the first part of the strategy Leisa Reichelt:15:37:46 here’s the next Leisa Reichelt:15:37:53 there are three key pathways to documentation content Leisa Reichelt:15:38:01 1. i have a specific problem I need an answer to Leisa Reichelt:15:38:05 in which case, i search Leisa Reichelt:15:38:16 2. i’m new at drupal, or some aspect of drupal and I need to get up to speed Leisa Reichelt:15:38:31 in which cse, i need access to some ‘designed’ content (eg. tutorials) Leisa Reichelt:

Drupal.org redesign - Cardsorting Module CategoriesNovember 18 2008

If you’ve been following along you’d be aware that one of the nuts we’re currently trying to crack is the modules section of the drupal.org website - how can we make modules more findable?

In the interest of gathering more information to help make a good decision, i’ve put together another little cardsorting exercise. If you have a spare 15mins or so, I’d love if you could take a look at it!

You can find it here: http://disambiguity.optimalsort.com/drupalmodules/

If you have any comments/questions/feedback to the contents of the cardsort or the process, feel free to post them here.

The cardsort is set to close on Friday 21 November.

Thank you!

Drupal.org redesign: making modules findableNovember 14 2008

One thing I’ve learned on this project so far is that if you’ve been using Drupal for more than about ten minutes, chances are you’ve had a look for a module or two.

Research participants are rarely unanimous but I think I can safely say that every single Drupal user I have spoken to has told me how difficult it is to firstly find and then evaluate the usefulness of modules.

So. That’s one thing we’d really like to help to fix in this redesign.

In the latest iteration, you can see where we’ve gotten to so far with the modules landing page - it’s a start but it doesn’t really begin to address the really difficult questions which are:

• how do people look for modules? and
• how do we design the interface and information architecture so that people can find the module they need?

Frankly, I could really do with your help.

Here’s the current version: http://drupal.org/project/Modules

And, here’s what we know:

• most advanced users will use Google search to find a module on Drupal,org using keywords that they think are likely to be in the module name
• advanced users refinding a known module are likely to use the URL (remembered or bookmarked) to get to the module page
• everyone finds it difficult to find a module from the current list of categories

Drupal.org redesign - Iteration 7, for your review!November 6 2008

Welcome to the latest iteration of the Drupal.org redesign project which you can find here:

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration7/

We’re both excited and nervous to show you this latest version because we’ve taken a bit of a deviation from our previous path as a result of both feedback from you and usability testing, and us not being quite satisfied with the work that had been done so far.

There were a couple of things that were really bugging us in the versions up to now.  In particular, the navigation in the header (there was so much of it and it looked kind of messy and confusing and in tests, we observed that people completely ignored it!). The Logged In version of the homepage was a good idea but the execution was coming up short as we learned that ‘hard core’ Drupallers thought it was a v valuable addition to the site but just about everyone else wasn’t interested… 

A behaviour which we have observed since the very early days on this project has the use of search - lots of people use search lots of the time, and a lot of the tasks that the site has to support are heavily search oriented (finding modules, finding help etc.). Drupal.org users have some of the most advanced Google skills I’ve ever observed! - and yet up until now, the redesign of the site didn’t really p