CivicActions

It is well documented/recognized that Drupal is really not very good at picking and sticking with a nomenclature that makes sense to the un-indoctrinated. The recent user testing at UMN made that pretty clear.

As the person on the team who is often working on the configuration of a website and running into the language in the GUI and then explaining the newly built site to the client it is often not until I do the latter that I realize how convoluted some of words used in Drupal are.

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

Yesterday I met CiviCRM co-founder Dave Greenberg to discuss potential usability improvements to CiviCRM, an open source constituent relationship management system. Dave is heading to Australia for the CiviCRM retreat and wanted to have wireframes in hand. Dave suggested we start by focusing on two specific pages: the Contact Summary and Search Results pages. A newbie CiviCRM user, I hoped my "beginner's mind" would help me understand the "pain points" our clients feel in using the new system. I quickly realized that I'd need to have a better sense of how people typically use CiviCRM in their daily workflow.

Here's a call-out to those who regularly use CiviCRM:

1. What do you use CiviCRM for?
For example: I use CiviCRM for our contributions database, our donors database, and our customer database.

2. What are the most common scenarios in which you use CiviCRM (that specifically involve the Contact Summary or Search Results pages)?
For example: After receiving a few contribution checks, I go to the specific contacts to record their contributions.

3. Describe the click path you use to accomplish your actions.
For example: Home>Search Results page>Contact Summary>Contact: Contributions tab>New Contributions

4. What are your "pain points" on the Contact Summary or Search Results pages? Do you have any specific recommendations as to how to improve them?

For example: I think the "select records" radio buttons should be ABOVE the "print" and "more actions" buttons/drop down.

For example: I think there should be "Edit" buttons in each section of the contact summary page, not only at the top. Perhaps a "pencil" icon next to each collapsable field set that allows you to edit the date just in that section.

Post your comments here!

Today's Module Monday is a quick one. I can't believe that for so long so many people have lived with the "node/add" page or the "Create Content" menu items as the primary way to add a new node to a Drupal site -- I can't believe I put up with this for so long! Well, last November I was working on a project and we ran up against this "problem", it was particularly acute due to the use of Organic Groups.

Recently, a GHOP student asked me for some help in dealing with usability issues in a drupal contrib module and wanted to know about resources for learning usability. Here I've published my response for others' benefit:

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Hi,

I consider myself a usability student. I'm definitely not a usability expert -- although I have a strong interest in it and I pursue that interest aside from my paid work, mostly through drupal. Anyway, here are my thoughts;

Like many things in life, I think usability is one of those things many people just 'get' naturally. I call this 'usability sense'. It's also possible to 'learn' usability and improve usability sense, knowledge and understanding through practice, literature and other resources.

In this way 'learning usability' is a lot like learning to play music. Many people 'get' music straight away. They learn the tools (their musical instruments) and then they're away.

The Season of Usability Drupal project has been announced by OpenUsability over at the Season of Usability blog. Link to there announcement: Drupal Student Project Kicked Off.

On a personal note, I'm really excited this is finally happening and that I have so much support from the drupal community, core developers, Dries, CivicActions and OpenUsability.

I'm really happy to announce that Károly Négyesi (aka chx) has offered to be my technical mentor in my Season of Usability project on Drupal.  Further Károly also promised to implement the results of the project;  "I am making this program better and bigger by promising that I will code whatever you come up with".

I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal.

As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.

Last night I attended a talk by Steve Krug (Don't Make me THINK) hosted by the Puget Sound SigCHI group. Krug's talk, a new one, was titled, “Yes, Virginia, there is a perfect web page”

He focused on 2 design conventions that he believes make web pages inherently better. And while both are pretty easy to get right, he believed that designers rarely do.

I had a conversation earlier this week with Mindy Herman, and I mentioned that one of our clients had done eyetracking on some visual designs for their site, and she was fascinated by the technology.