Taming complexity
Drupal 8 UX

Drupalcamp Finland, May 2013

Roy Scholten@royscholtenyoroy on drupal.org

Drupal UX

Drupal 6 usability tests: disaster!Drupal 7 usability: fixed many basic critical flawsDrupal 8 usability: hitting the really hard to solve issues

Drupal 8 UX

Author experienceSite builder improvementsMobileStyle guideProcess

Author experience

Why is this important?

You work on a site a couple of months. Your clients might be spending years with the solution you delivered.

These people are getting more influence in choosing the CMS. Author UX is important!

Previous presentation mentioned that once in core, functionality freezes. That's why it's important that core provides good defaults, because it's likely not extended with contrib modules

WYSIWYG!

Not news anymore, but yes, D8 ships with a wysiwyg editor.

This is a mixed blessing of course, but at least this saves some time in setting things up.

Up to you to apply it wisely.

Edit in place

A basic general rule for good interaction design is to expose operations directly on the object that can be manipulated.

D7 introduced contextual links as a first step

D8 will have edit in place where not only the link but also the actual editing takes place on the object itself.

Demo in firefox: customize teaser

Content creation page

Edit in place is what it is: you edit existing content more easily.

Creating new content is something else. The content creation page is a very important interface for content creator. Obviously.

We spent a lot of time researching, designing, implementing an updated UI for this page

I can tell some more about the design process later, to clarify how we get stuff done in core, but this is the design we ended up with and have been implementing.

Author UX

WYSIWYGEdit in placeContent creation page

So,

WYSIWYG, Edit in place, Content creation page.

This also means that things like configurable editorial workflows or content staging didn't really make it in core. Enough room for contributed modules to improve things!

Site builder tools

Which brings us to another category of user interfaces.

And this is actually an important point to consider: it's crucial to know for which kind of role you want to improve things.

Design is about making trade-offs. No use to strive for perfection. Know that when you optimize for X, you are likely to make Y a bit harder to achieve.

Views in core!

This means a big increase of useful functionality available out of the box. Talk about managing complexity

It also means we still have a lot to do to bring more consistency and efficiency to the user interface.

Usability testing showed that besides many parts of the ui are (needlessly) complex and wordy, the biggest issue is that it is not clear what you can actually do with it.

Anyway

Modules, D7

Ah, modules page. The page everybody loves to hate.

This is the D7 version.

- list gets very long, hard to find stuff. Dependency info clutters the page.- Categories do not really help

This was a really tough page to redesign, lots of opinions and some of the issues can't really be solved.

Modules, D8

I think this whole design process got some 1000+ comments across multiple issues.

The trick is to get a proposal into a patch, not only design

Usability test to provide data and prevent opinion wars.

Two fixes:- simpler first impression, less data up front- live filter to reduce the list

DEMO

Translation UI

Translation UI and workflow has seen some changes as well.

Site builder UX

ViewsModules pageTranslation

This also means we did not:

- Redesign the Fields UI- Made building menus/navigation easier- Improve the Blocks UI significantly (but maybe)

Definately enough interesting challenges to work on for Drupal 9 :)

Mobile

And of course, making the whole of the Drupal toolset work on smaller screens provides some interesting challenges.

Respon
sive
toolbar

One big obvious flaw with D7 admin on small screens is that the toolbar breaks the layout completely.

A lot of energy went into making the toolbar work on small screens.

It works! The UX is not completely smooth yet. And it makes an excellent show case of the amount of admin page we have.

DEMO

Installer

When discussing mobile use cases, you often hear the argument that people wont do this or that on a phone.

Maybe. But I think, if you 'can't imagine x or y, it's more often a lack of imagination then that the scenario is not feasible.

Maybe not now, but Drupal 8 is a tool for the next 4 years or so. And, as a framework, Drupal can't be too specific about what parts to leave out. Aim is to make 100% of admin responsive and usable on small screens.

Bartik & Seven responsive

DEMO: Responsive tables

Mobile UX

Responsive toolbarBartik and Seven are responsiveNot yet 100% of admin UI: inline edit, drag&drop, field UI

This also means we did not:

- Redesign the Fields UI- Made building menus/navigation easier- Improve the Blocks UI significantly (but maybe)

Definately enough interesting challenges to work on for Drupal 9 :)

Seven style guide

Dedicated admin theme Seven introduced in D7. Big win, fixed one of the most fundamental critical usability issues.

But it needed to be extended to

Needs work:

Mobile issues

Style guide

Blocks UI

Views UI

Join UX team

Groups.drupal.org/usability

http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=Usability

#drupal-usability in IRC

Thank you!

Roy Scholten@royscholtenyoroy on drupal.org

Links, resources

Usability group http://groups.drupal.org/usability

Usability issues http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=Usability

Style guide proposal http://groups.drupal.org/node/283223

Style guide implementation http://drupal.org/node/1953374

Mobile issues http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=mobile

Views usability test http://groups.drupal.org/node/267508

Blocks UI http://drupal.org/node/187525

Spark http://drupal.org/project/spark

Content page research http://groups.drupal.org/node/214898

Content page designs http://groups.drupal.org/node/217434

Content page usability test http://groups.drupal.org/node/229038

Content page implementation http://drupal.org/node/1510532

Encore:
UX process

Keynote showed Dries talking about distributions in 2006.

This is me sketching a UI pattern similar to what ended up as the new modules page design.

In 2009.

On the one hand, the pace of innovation is very high. At the same time it can years to change (improve) fundamentals

How we work

Click to edit the title text format

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