Usability, usability, and usability
The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students have completed a usability study on Drupal. The result is a great report (PDF) and an incredibly valuable video which they shared on drupal.org. It is too important not to share, so the video is also embedded below.
The results are consistent with the results from usability tests done at the University of Minnesota.
The results can't be ignored.
I printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.
I have been working with drupal for about 6 months, so I still have fresh in my memory my first experiences with drupal. I am completely agree with the results shown in the video.
July 3, 2008 - 10:34These issues should be solved, but care should be taken not to pay any cost in what drupal is.
Drupal's great, no doubt about it. It's so powerful! But I've been using it for about 6 months too and completely agree that its usability is not as great as it should be. Without the Admin Menu (or DHTML menu) module I wouldn't have the patience to keep using it...
July 8, 2008 - 00:18You can reserve that 10% for the issue regarding the mental model of the users about what an admin interface should look like, its unlikely we can get a good admin interface in before 7.0, if you take a look at wordpress they recently completely overhauled the admin interface, which kinda gives a sense on how hard it is. I still think the best way to tackle that problem, is to create a few modules that take different approaches to this, so that they can be tested.
Almost all issues identified have an issue or a post in g.d.o usability group, however some of them need further usability testing to see which method is the best one.
It would be interesting also to test with intermediate users of Drupal, since not only beginners struggle with Drupal.
July 3, 2008 - 11:31I feel like addressing the admin UI issue is pretty straightforward:
- Just take the existing ability to have an "admin" theme (/admin/settings/admin), enable it by default, and set it to some minor variant of the existing default theme -- maybe the same theme but with different colors and images.
- To help users see the difference, the install process should guide them towards choosing a theme BEFORE they start entering content, instead of after. People are simply accustomed to choosing their "template" before they create content.
- Change the default theme. Seriously, if people get confused by Garland's "weird triangle things" then let's not use have weird triangle things in our default theme. Something that looks even a little more like a contemporary website would help people make sense of things.
July 3, 2008 - 13:56As far as usability goes, Drupal can indeed take queues from more friendly designer influences. CiviCRM, for example, has an iconic interface--every important link such as Manage CiviCRM, Manage Groups, Custom Data, CiviCRM Profile--these have an accompanying image that imprint in the user's mind better than text alone. CiviCRM also has a long way to go, but Drupal is far behind making the admin interface as clean and friendly, if not moreso, than the front end themes.
This is the natural progression of such a project, of course, and I don't think we need to feel terrible about it, just empowered by it--programmers married to it have taken on the UI, and now we have to bring in those "outside the frame" of the painting to really make it stellar.
July 3, 2008 - 14:28Drupal's usability can definitely be improved but is it really a drawback that the administrative interface doesn't necessarily visually differ from the front-end in Drupal?
July 3, 2008 - 18:40The people who participated in the study had experience with systems such as Joomla und Wordpress where back-end and front-end are completely separated. So they expect this to be some kind of standard that doesn't actually exist.
People I talked to who were also new to Drupal are very happy with Drupal’s lightweight admin interface, that is not stuffed with options and looks like their site.
Printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.
Thank you Dries for getting serious about this! I look forward to blogging about your decision and holding you to your word :)
We little folks at the bottom can not push or make changes easily without someone at the top leading. I hope the core developers and the community gather around this very important decision you have made!
I look forward to a more friendlier "first time" experience in Drupal 7.
July 3, 2008 - 18:41Make sure to read Nick Lewis' suggestions. A lot of these can be turned into patches that I'd happily accept.
July 4, 2008 - 07:40I can't emphasise enough, how much I support your "crossing of 90%" list. This is definitely the right thing to do.
July 4, 2008 - 08:23Still under the influence of Steven Wittens last Blogpost... Having followed the Usability development in Drupal for about 3/4 of a year, and, admittedly, contributed by far too little myself, I believe the following:
Drupal definitely is much more a framework than a system at this very moment. This is great in it's own right. As such Usability is not important, since it is mostly used by very tech-savvy people that have the time to learn it. Once you are beyond this point, UX Improvements are not more than a nice-to-have.
But as there is no history in getting it closer to the everyday-user, I see quite a long way to go. There is not even a consensus in the community that this is a goal.
We are definitely lacking Manpower to really start. Automated Software Testing has been set up in comparatively no time and I'm quite confident it will work very soon.
User testing should be just as important, but you have to perform it, it is tedious work. Hopefully the Usability Testing Suite can help a bit. But I take my prognosis D7 might bring a big change - D8 might do.
As I said in the beginning - I write this under the influence of Stevens last post, so It sounds like a complain post, and it really is.
So how to change this:
- Get into action myself: take me by the word, I'll try to carry my load.
- Time will tell. It just is slower than I thought. This doesn't mean that nothing happens.
July 5, 2008 - 06:10I've only been using Drupal for about a month and it has been an interesting but also challenging experience, particularly at the beginning.
I was really pleased to see the video and report because it really shows very clearly what the barriers are to greater adoption of Drupal. The "out of the box" experience is very unintuitive and most users don't persevere with things that they find confusing or too difficult, instead they give up and try something else.
So I'm glad to hear that improving usability is going to be high on the priority list for future releases because I don't think its importance can be overestimated.
Usability issues aside, you'll be pleased to hear I have caught the Drupal bug! I'm planning to use it exclusively in the future and it looks like an exciting journey.
July 5, 2008 - 13:24I do not really like that "plan-less user usability tests". Why should a user that can not differ between "story" and "page" administrate Drupal? And does it really matter, if "create content" is a fitting term?
Don't we customize that terms and types anyway?
So, what the study says is: "Someone who has no plan what he's doing can admin 90% of Drupal" - What's the sense in this?
It's a fine result without question - and yes, picking up the other 10% can be useful. But is Drupal like wordpress or phpBB?
No it's not. If you are clever, you can use Drupal to blog and forum because it's a framework not a system. You can build a community site with Drupal that's much more powerful and functional than with wordpress or phpBB.
And imho the price for more flexibility (complexity) is a more difficult administration. If you design a i.e. newsflash-site with Drupal yo will anyway provide a different admin interface and workflow for the different roles of the project members.
Imho, Drupal is terrible good because it's so flexible!
Instead of changing the overall admin interface, Drupal could provide simple "facades" for "the blog user" or the "forum user" as an install image.
In my mind Drupal always was a CMS framework not a CMS. Is there a community discussion about this?
July 7, 2008 - 07:02Drupal already has install profiles, but they're under-used. As of this week, we have an 'experts' install profile (with no content types, only dblog module enabled etc.) and the 'default' install profile - which has a default tags vocabulary for articles, and will hopefully have some more very basic defaults to give examples to new users.
I don't think it's in anyone's interests to dumb-down Drupal, but many issues that are barriers to new users, are issues that seasoned developers have learned to work around after years of using the software. I type urls directly to get to admin/* screens instead of using the panel. Some people look in hook_menu to see where settings pages are configured when installing a new module - neither of these are good things, they're adaptations to cope with user interface issues which while not fatal, will improve things for everyone when fixed.
July 7, 2008 - 10:34We should try and find a good way to quickly introduce improvements and test them. I'm hoping we can put together something of a Usability Sprint at Drupalcon Szeged. Anybody interested in helping out should say so here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/12972
July 7, 2008 - 14:00Concerning the back end front. I think you can improve this buy giving an option to view the page, and still be logged in buy pressing say a "view" button (e.g. top right corner) and then going into the edit mode if needed by pressing the same button, which will say "edit" at the time of being in view mode.
I have been using http://www.moonfruit.com/ online software, and thats how it is there.
It's actually pretty cool software, where you can edit content online. Pretty cool for an static site.
Best
July 8, 2008 - 19:12These people just haven't got a clue, same thing happened to me.
I'll be trying to get a clue the rest of the week, wish me good luck.
July 14, 2008 - 09:18I'm just now reading about this. (Even though Dries and I work closely, there's just stuff we don't get time to talk about.)
I've long had the thought that Drupal's admin interface needs "layered." The initial pages a new site owner/admin has to create content, ..., should simply omit links to lots of the admin capability, and focus on the first few tasks they need to do. E.g. pick a theme. Understand what their site is doing. Create their first page, and see it in context. Etc.
As they gain understanding, more extensive choices should become available that allows them to become more facile.
Many people, over time, become proud of the fact that they really know how to use a particular bit of software. They don't mind learning it. But they need to learn it incrementally, and not have a huge mountain to climb when they first encounter it.
We'll be making investments in Drupal UI at Acquia. It's not my job (at the moment) to think about what they are. I can only say I - like Dries - feel we (the Drupal Community) need to make a TON of progress in this for Drupal to grow like it can / should.
July 15, 2008 - 13:53Post new comment