 Hi, welcome back from lunch, this presentation is entitled user experience for open source how to galvanize a community. Before we get started, can we get a show of hands about who watched any of the usability studies live that we're going to talk about? Awesome. Who heard about them? Even better. Okay, cool. So, I'm Becky Gessler, I'm a UX designer, currently I work for university now and that's me on Twitter and Drupal.org, Technica. I'm Garen, I work at Google on Search and you can find me on Twitter and Drupal.org by that handle. And my name is Jen Lampton, I work for Chapter 3 and I'm really involved in Drupal usability, I'm the usability team on the usability team and that's how you can find me on Drupal.org and Twitter also. Okay, cool. So, in Dries' keynote yesterday, he said that Drupal is 6.7% of all content, or it runs 6.7% of all content management system websites on the internet and he painted a vision to say how could we grow and make Drupal larger and take, you know, have larger market share within the CMS ecosystem and one of the things that he said, the way that we could do that is by making Drupal easier and better and that is why we did this. Yeah, so we want to talk a little bit about why originally we wanted to do this study and then also how this study can be pretty easily replicated. So when I was working at Google with Garen, one thing we realized was that, you know, there's a large amount of people here at this campus in Mountain View, thousands actually, that fit this profile of being technically savvy, not engineers, but, you know, tech savvy, these are people that should be able to download Drupal, install it and just make a basic website with it. Each of us have, you know, learned Drupal by ourselves and then also taught Drupal or trained other people in Drupal. So we've all been aware of the different struggles people face when trying to learn Drupal from the start. So, and since, you know, we all have these UX sensibilities, we figured this would be a great time for a usability study. So let's, I guess, take a look at a video. This is a clip from one of the participants in the study. I don't think that's it. What do you think that list is? So add a new field, I can select the field type. He's trying to figure out what it is. I feel like it's in the right direction, but I don't know the words in context of websites. Let's see, long text. Still no idea. So we did eight of these. This was user three, I think, right? And they're all available online for you guys to watch. We'll get into that a little bit later. So let's start talking about how to actually do this. So like I said, we had a really set audience or profile in mind of who we actually wanted to be doing this study with. We wanted people that were tech savvy, not engineers, and that had never used Drupal before. So the first thing that we did was create a survey just to sort of send out to people within Google. These were all Google employees that did this study. So basically through word of mouth and just kind of talking to a bunch of people, we sent out this survey trying to get sort of key characteristics about people, and then based on that, we chose them for the study or not. Now, what's really unique about this study is not only that we had two scripts, so we had four users doing one script. We also really wanted to simulate people building real websites. So when we asked people to fill out that survey, one of the questions was, what kind of website do you want to build? What kind of functionality would it have? So instead of just putting someone up to the task of like build some random website that you don't care about nor have any investment in, we were having people that were saying, you know, my parents have this store and my dad wants me to make this website that showcases their products, I'd like to do that one day. So using those sort of real situations, we kind of sculpted the script around that. So our two different scripts, the first one, was really about content management, building and organizing content, using content types. Also, we introduced fields and we tried to reach the point where people were installing and configuring modules and enabling them. Our second script also did some of the content management basics, but we were able to, we actually decided to bring some contributed modules into the study. So we weren't just doing Drupal core stuff. We were using contributed modules like views. We actually did that in the first day too. But so we put users into the views interface, sort of like accelerated where they might be and got some feedback on that. We also were doing stuff with image styles. So the set up for the first day was pretty similar to what we'd done on previous usability studies. In the beginning, we were just trying to get people to use Drupal core as it is out of the box and play with some of the stuff that was already there. They used the toolbar module. They visited the dashboard page. At the end of the day, we did have them use views. We wanted to test the simple views UI and see if that worked. It was pretty successful. But in the second study, we took out the toolbar module and put an admin menu instead. And we took out the dashboard module and we put in total control instead. We wanted to have some compare and contrast options for those different features, the same features, but done different ways. And we also put in WYSIWYG just to see if people's reaction to that would be any different. So there's a different set up for both tests. So a good question is how did it actually work? And it really is not that hard. And I promise you almost everybody in this room could do this yourself. The only two pieces of fancy hardware that we had were a big Mac tower that was capable of handling all of the streaming and recording that we were doing while allowing the user to browse the web. And we had a really cool microphone that one of my coworkers had that actually picked up the audio really well. We used three pieces of software. Camtasia is a really great easy way to capture your screen and the audio of what's going on in HD. It's got a free 30-day trial, so you can just download that. We use livestream.com to livestream it in HD. That was completely free, so props to them for letting us stream HD for free. And we also use Google Hangouts on Air kind of as a, and so all three of these kind of served as a big backup mechanism to make sure that we got everything and it was all being recorded simultaneously. So what was it actually like in the room? This is a view from my face. What there were is there were two, so there were four of us in the room. There was Becky sitting next to the participant actually asking the questions and guiding them through the task or attempting to see how well they guided themselves through the task. And Jen and I were sitting next to each other looking at a mirror of what Becky and the participant were seeing on another monitor and we were up there making sure that the streaming and the actual site was functioning. Well, meanwhile, online, this was happening in the... How many of you guys were in the Drupal usability IRC during that time? Awesome. So you guys actually saw how cool it was that people were shouting about how painful watching these users struggle was. So it was really neat to see that... I think the highest viewer account a single time I saw was 111 people and that was just at one time. So there were probably a lot of people that saw this. Yeah, that was only livestream. We don't know how many people were on Hangouts on Air because it was still in beta at the time. So this is what was happening online. It was very quiet in the room, but it was very loud and there was a lot of discussion online and that was one of the really cool aspects about it. So once we finished, we stuck the videos up on YouTube. We made a playlist and we got to work actually analyzing and digesting these things. One of the really neat things about putting them on YouTube is that, I don't know if you know this, but you can right-click on the YouTube, I guess, the status bar along the bottom of the video and you can copy the URL at a specific time so you can link to a specific time in a specific YouTube video. And so what we did is we pulled out links of specific moments where users were struggling or had really great quotes that allowed us to show what they were thinking of at that time and we organized them into a whole bunch of themes. We organized them by themes and modules and that's what you can see up here. So the next thing we did is we took this organized list and put it in this really big table on Drupal.org and we wanted to do this so there was sort of one central repository of all the different issues that we came across in the study. And so right now, this is up, we'll put this link up somewhere, but yes, it's linked to from the usability group. And basically, we have sort of what the issue was and then like Garen said, those direct links to it and what's really awesome is that right now, people in the community are going ahead and making issues and putting them into the right issue queues for these specific problems. So we think this is really awesome that people are doing it and we definitely need to keep up that momentum and keep going. So be sure to check this out and if you're someone who is sort of like an expert in a module area or you just really care about it, see if there's any way you can start carrying on the conversation in the right places. The other thing we did which actually just went up last night which we're really excited about is that we created a sort of higher level usability report and we're gonna talk about some of the conclusions later in the presentation. This is also available on triple.org. Okay, so a lot of things went really well because it was successful. One of the great things that went well was Helpline Gen. Gen was in the room so when users struggled after a few minutes, they didn't have to struggle for the rest of the hour, they could just ask Gen and she would help get them through and on to the next task. The other things that were really helpful is to have a high speed internet connection. The double monitor setup was really great so that Gen and I could monitor what was happening at the same time as Becky and the participant was seeing it. It's important to make sure it all works beforehand so test it and the redundancy because we had some problems where we like forgot to turn on the audio capture on one thing and the video capture on another thing but the redundancy is important and I mean, yeah. So that being said, there are definitely some things that could have been done a lot better. The videos were released pretty quickly but at the same time, there's really no reason why they shouldn't have been released the exact same day they happened. All we did was save the file, make sure it was, you know, the thing played from start to finish and then we uploaded it to YouTube. The YouTube conversion takes like, I don't know, 45 minutes or something but then it's online. A really central part of making one of these things successful, I think we've all realized is keeping up the momentum and so if you have 115 people watching something but then you don't try to engage with them until another week later, it's kind of hard to make everyone just as passionate as they were about it in the IRC channel. So getting the videos up faster in general, just like doing, speed is great, anything you can do faster, do it faster. More press and hype, just the idea that, I mean, we ended up getting a lot of people watching but I think if we had planned a little bit more beforehand we could have gotten this even sort of a bigger deal before it started happening. We, like that survey, the screenshot of that survey that I showed you guys previously, we didn't do one of those for participants after the session. That, I mean, I just don't think we really thought it out. I think it would have been a great thing to have to ask people questions sort of like, so what do you think of Drupal or just have a list of adjectives? Which of these adjectives, you know, best describes your experience with Drupal just to get some of that feedback? Additionally, I know, I guess, and he says on Wednesday our last session, and we were like, all right, everyone go into Drupal usability IRC channel and we'll talk about it on Monday. Which is cool, but we could have also really scheduled some times for everyone to meet and talk about things. We could have also used, we could have done Google Hangouts on air again and been like, everyone, let's come in and talk about it live. Let's keep the liveness of the situation going. We do want to stress though, you don't have to be a big awesome company like Google to do this though. Like this is a type of thing that can be repeated many times and it should be repeated many times because it really helps us as a community to come together and see, wow, like there's definitely some things here that need to be improved. The things that Google really helped us with is the fact that we had a large surplus of people who fit our demographic. Google was totally down to do this and willing to let their employees spend time during their day to do this and also Google provided the t-shirts that we gave to participants as compensation. So honestly, if you work at a somewhat medium-sized company that works with Drupal or encourages your work with Drupal, you don't, and remember, you don't need to be testing with brand new users. You can pick any demographic you'd like for a study. All you need to do is get about eight people, use your setup. Like Darren said, the technology we used was, at least from the streaming perspective, all free or what we did it for free. Yeah, and the thing is, you don't even need to stream it. I mean, if you wanna take three or four hours out of your day and say, you know what, this module is really hard to do, so grab two or three people from your office who aren't familiar with it and just put on Camtasia, watch them struggle through it, throw it up on YouTube. But that in and of itself is so helpful and that only took you three hours. And then that'll start a discussion. I mean, you can go big and do the whole streaming thing, but you can do it small. You don't have to do all the bells and whistles as well. Let's talk about why doing it live is awesome. Typically when you do a usability study, it's like the person moderating the study, the participant, and then maybe five people behind a glass wall or something watching. That really limits the circulation of the information. Even if it's just those people and they all write blog posts and they all go on Twitter and talk about it, it really only emotionally touched and was experienced by those five people and I guess the moderator. When you do this stuff live and you stream it, you bring it to an unlimited number of people. Like in our case, over 100 people were watching and going through these struggles and pains of new users together. And for open source, we think this is really awesome. Also a great thing this study did was with the IRC channel going, real-time discussion happening, real-time planning and problem solving and people being like, oh my God, that would be so easy to fix. Let me just go make an issue about it. It brought us, I think it really brought us together as a community and it's also bringing UX things more to the forefront of what's up in Dribble right now. So let's go into a little bit of the different conclusions we found that we talk about in that higher level summary. So basically all those different issues that are in that exhaustive list on Dribble.org, we've organized them into four different layers. You can kind of put the issues into these different buckets and those are interface, terminology, flow and conceptual. So let's talk a little bit about each of those. So the first problem we ran into was interface and a lot of these problems are not necessarily easy to fix but they're easy to identify. When someone's on a certain page, they don't know what button to click or they click the button and it doesn't do what they think it's supposed to do. It's labeled wrong, it's in the wrong place, it doesn't have the right action. People can't interact with the interface in an appropriate way. We experienced this a lot and it resulted in a lot of direct issues that were created and some that have already been resolved. The second problem was terminology. This is another one that seems like it should be pretty straightforward to fix. People looked at lists and didn't know what the words meant. People looked at navigation and didn't know where to go and it's just a matter of trying to get the words that we use to match the words that normal people use. Again, simple problem to fix is hard to decide what to actually change it to. So flow, what we're talking about here is the situation where a user's trying to complete a task and they're somewhere along the process, let's say they're trying to configure an image style. They're at one screen and they're like, okay, what's next? Where do I go next? They're looking around for some sort of clue about how to continue or there's no logical sequence for them, at least in their mind. There's no sequence about how to continue doing things. The whole flow, their mental model of how I can change how images appear in my Drupal website does not match how Drupal wants you to change images on your website. This is also stuff where, actually image styles is a great example because every, I think, was it every user? Every user believed that from the display, like when you're going to manage fields and you're looking at the display fields interface, every single user thought, well, why can't I change how the image looks from here? Every single, right, was it in every one? Every single one. They hit this idea of going up to image styles and then configuration, that was not there. Yeah, that was a bad one. So conceptual layer. This is really the big underlying one here in that users that are new to the Drupal system just don't understand how it works. The only time our users solidly understood what they were doing is when Drupal worked like a conventional blogging platform, like Blogspot or WordPress. Like when they were able to hit add piece of content, type it out, add in some keywords, hit save and it appeared on the front page of their website, that made a lot of sense to them. But all of the awesome things that Drupal can do, like allow you to really take, like customize your content and create specific lists and displays of it, that whole aspect was just not there. Because Drupal didn't provide any sort of contextual clues for them to pick up on that. It was only the surface level that they were able to scratch. They weren't able to go more deeper than that. Okay, so we're gonna talk about some of the stuff that went really well. One thing that really surprised me, I'm a huge fan of the admin module. I hate the toolbar module, so every time I go to Drupal 7 and turn off toolbar and turn on admin menu, so I was like, we gotta test it. It's gonna do so much better. It didn't do so much better. It was really surprising to watch people navigate from the top all the way to the bottom. Every single time they'd end up clicking on list, which was the last link. And they missed pages like content, which are really important because that was a top level link. And if there's a drop down, I'm just gonna drop down and keep going in. So that was really surprising. So toolbar did really well. The administration overlay, this is something that we improved from Drupal 6. People understood this is administration, this is me looking at the website and there was a great distinction between that. Closing the overlay and seeing the content refresh right away was really gratifying to people. They were like, oh, look, it just happened. That's exactly what I wanted. There was no refreshing the page. It was just really happy. And then we also showed people the View Simple UI, the very beginning where like, now go make a list. We did have to explain why it was called Views, which was terminology. But as soon as I got in there and they were like, oh, I want a list of these posts in this order save and it worked. It was like, you know, Views in Drupal 6 never have that experience. The new Simple UI in Drupal 7 was very successful. So there's a lot of really great things we learned too. So Drupal has a steep learning curve for new people. But we really feel it doesn't have to be this way. As a community, let's strive to make Drupal more helpful and supportive of new users. You know this screen? It's really not that helpful or supportive of people when they first installed Drupal. So after doing this whole study, we actually thought up a proposal of a way to actually take advantage of this particular portion of the installation path and give new users a chance to catch up to speed. Yeah, so what we think would be really helpful is because so many problems arose from this lack of conceptual foundation. Like people don't understand what content, content types fields are and they're forced to interact with them when they're building a site. We propose giving them a short little quick easy tutorial when they first install Drupal. Something that all of you guys who already know this, you can click the X in the corner and get rid of. But this would, but this, you know, spending three, four, five minutes on this might really, really help and save a user hours. So yeah, and another thing that we think would be really cool is to make sure that they know that they're not alone when they're going through this. Because we all know that there are so many resources out there that a lot of us have written and contributed and we wanna make sure that new users know about that. So what we have here is we have a very roughed, like wireframe, prototype style mock of what this could be. It's a 10-side thing that when the user first gets to their Drupal installation, this is something that could see them. We don't know if this is the right format. I mean, and I'm sure that it'll, you know, something that would have to go through many, many iterations, but this is a, this is something to start talking about. So what we would first do is we would introduce that Drupal actually cares about your content. Content is very important because we have to separate the idea of content from a webpage. So contents are called nodes. That's an important piece of terminology that new users don't get right now. Content is organized into content types. And we explain, yeah, actually in the first slide, we introduced the metaphor of building a newspaper because that helps us tell a story in a very relatable way that everybody, everybody, no matter whether you're advanced or whether you're a, you know, very basic user, you have, you know what a newspaper website looks like. It would have different content types like events and articles. We say within those content types, there's fields. And fields help us build the relationship between things. This is why fields are useful. You know, these are very key fundamental vocabulary items that we're introducing to users. Yeah, anything on the themes? Yeah, so for people that are very visually oriented, themes are something that they're drawn to. We had one user that immediately went to the appearance page before even trying to create content. And this user actually, I think one of her comments were Bartik7, what is that? I don't get it. So in this method, what we're trying to do is show them the actual screen and then sort of contextually give some instruction about what things are. So there's the appearance page. And after doing the idea of themes, it's a great segue to modules because modules are also things that are installed onto your website, right? One of the, I think the most unfortunate things of the study was that we all know how many amazing awesome modules are out there and how much is possible using modules. Most of these new users just did not even think of the idea of adding a module. Even after they were told of the idea of a module, it was like, they didn't think, oh, maybe there's a module that can do that. Let me go check. That thought process wasn't there. So giving them that from the very beginning, like, hey, if you wanna do something and you're not really sure, search for it, there's probably a way to kinda plug it into your site using a module. We thought that would be a super helpful thing for new people. And then again, like with the appearance page, giving a screenshot of what the modules page looks like with some very simple contextual things about enabled versus disabled, where you can find configuration options. Also going off on the idea of how modules are so important to people that are using Drupal to sort of telling the users, hey, these are some of the most popular, commonly used modules that people don't really do without. And this is where you can link to them. And it's okay because you're probably gonna use them too. Like, you know, the fact that right now there's no WYSIWYG editor, rather than being having, well, can you do that? Can you add WYSIWYG right from the start? Look, there's lots of things that are not there right now but you can add them all and they're modules. And here are some really awesome ones. And lastly, we wanted to end on a positive, encouraging note, sort of both introducing people to the Drupal community to like Darren was saying, this idea that there's a whole network of people that are learning and providing resources and willing to help. We also think a tutorial or sort of walkthrough like this would make people jump into the community at a slightly more elevated level. Maybe instead of asking like, you know, what's a node, these sort of, these types of terminology questions, they already have a vocabulary to use to articulate their problems, to articulate what exactly they're trying to achieve. And so also like Darren said, you know, going forward, it's not like this is the best way to do it. You know, like this is a walkthrough method, there's also a video contextual tooltip, sort of as you go through an interface, something gets revealed, you can hover over stuff, step-by-step tutorial, there's many ways to accomplish this. And Darren and I actually spoke to Robert Hopeman Jr. He's the author of this book, Designing the Obvious. He's a pretty well-known usability guy and we showed him these mocks. We told him, he actually had never used Drupal before. So it was a really interesting conversation to have with him because he went through our mocks and we were able to see what he was getting and not getting. But he said, you know, this is definitely a solid approach to begin with and that with continual iteration and trying to find out what works and what doesn't work, it can only get better. So this is a quote from his really famous book that sold lots of copies. For users to feel good about an application, they need to feel as if they understand it. And Drupal is a web app. Right now that doesn't really happen. If you saw any portion of those usability studies, users were not, they did not walk away feeling comfortable and supported or as if they understood the system. They probably walked away wanting to use WordPress or something like that. So to bring it back to what Dries said is, in order for Drupal to grow and be a really successful content management system, it has to win the hearts and minds of people in Drupal 8. You can't do that if you create a hostile environment for them to learn how it works in. And so what we're really looking forward to is the community coming together and saying, how could we actually allow less technical users who are not developers, who aren't people who are fluent in PHP to come in and help this content management system grow? Because that's great for our ecosystem. Anything else you want to add? Okay cool, that's the end of our formal presentation and we would love to talk to you guys about what you saw and what feedback you have about the mocks or about the studies or any questions you have. So please come up to the microphone. Hi, I have first a comment. Thank you. This was absolutely amazing process to go through. So I've been part of two formal usability studies that we've done for Drupal before, one at the University of Minnesota in 2008, another one at the University of Minnesota in 2011. Thanks. And it's exactly as you were saying. It's like the eight of us in the room had our minds blown and our lives completely changed as a result of this and then we come and we try and explain it to people who've not been through it and they're like, yeah, but those people were just stupid. I mean, Drupal's not really that hard. You know, it's just like, it's really hard to explain. So this was fundamentally amazing because it really opened doors for everybody to get involved and see the impact of this. And those videos, I know we only had like 100, 150 people online at once, but those videos are being referenced in issues. Like look at this timestamp to this timestamp. It illustrates what we're seeing. I mean, it's really fundamentally changing the way that we are addressing usability stuff. So I just want to say thank you to Google, thank you to YouTube and Jen as well, like everything, it was just great. And the question I had is can you show the URL where all this stuff is online? Because we have a lot of code sprints and stuff like that happening and I'd love to point people at the stuff. Yeah, so we're gonna put up the slides and we're also gonna put up that entire mock-up thing. We can also put up the fireworks images if anyone wants to just actually play around and play with stuff, we'll put those all up. I guess we can tweet it and stuff. We're gonna, we'll open source the mocks, right? Yeah, but just in general, the larger conclusion, there's a seven page PDF that kind of outlines these conceptual findings divided by these four layers. That's our, yeah, it's got quotes and that's already online and there's quotes actually in the detailed report with links to the individual, you know, with the YouTube URLs. So more stuff will come, yeah, on groups at jubil.org slash usability, right? Yeah, that's the URL. Hey, thanks, my name is Ryan. Question I have, let me say that I will relate Microsoft Word to Drupal for just a minute and in terms of Microsoft Word having hundreds of features and average user uses five of them, Drupal using having hundreds of features, average user, like you said, editor, content creator, whatever, using five of them, is there a good way to dumb down the user interface so that you take away all of the advanced features? I mean, I know obviously permissions, you can keep people from doing certain things but I was just creating a Drupal 7 form and it had a thing on the right side that said reorder, row, entries or something like that and that was something that we had to hide with jQuery or Form API or something like that but is there a common module for dumbing these things down and removing advanced features? That's a great question. I think you're definitely right, a lot of stuff can be removed. The problem with installing a module is that you'd have to install a module to remove this, so that's why we're kind of a proponent of stuff to make life easier should go in core and then you should be able to unenable it or you should be able to add more stuff to make your life more complex, sure. There's also a lot of problems with removing stuff from interfaces because then when people get to the point where they actually want those features, they don't know they're there so that's also something that can make Drupal appear really limited if you do it too much so there's a really fragile line there. It also really makes advanced users upset and our community is full of really loud advanced users and we don't hear at all what the beginners say so there's definitely kind of treading both sides of that line is really important. Sure. Yeah and I also think maybe not, I think the idea of hiding things when relevant is definitely key. There were, for example, when you're adding a field, at this point the multi-step form process you need to go through just to add a feeling. What's the default value? How can they, what should the widget look? All these things people are like it's just too much exposure at that point in time. They just want to add the field and be able to upload the image but at the same time, dumbing things down is not necessarily how we want to approach new users. You know it's like right now maybe they feel kind of dumb or they feel alienated by the system but if we can empower them to feel like here's a really base set of stuff you can use and then there's so much more. I think that's definitely cool and also with dependencies on modules it gets tricky with what can we deal with and not deal with but yeah, good point. Cool, all right, thanks. So I definitely want to thank you also for the study and especially the live streaming aspect of it was amazing. So I participated in one of the previous usability studies in Minnesota that Jen and Angie were at and I think so the reason we couldn't do something like live streaming or even posting videos quickly there was because the usability lab that was done it had a very strict policy about confidentiality. So for example, if somebody had said something during the study that might reveal who they are we had to go back and scrub the videos and make sure that was cut out before we could release it. So I was wondering if you at Google had to deal with an issue like that? Yeah, I'm actually, I'm really glad you brought that up because it's something we forgot to put in here so each one of our participants signed a standard waiver basically saying from their part like hey it's fine if you put me online it's fine I'm gonna be online I don't care whatever so they were that part and then on the Google part originally I was thinking about saying oh let's try and use Google usability labs you know our own Google usability labs but it ended up that we were gonna be running into all those types of issues and it was like could we have done eye tracking could we have done cool stuff like that yes but all the red tape that would have been associated with that I think is what is really what ended up like let's just do it this simple stripped down way. You're also your point about having to edit things out we were also cognizant of that I guess we just really tried to ensure that well at least from what people were showing on their screens there would be no issues there and we prepped every user just by saying you know don't talk about Google secrets pretty much it's and I guess we trusted them from there on out. Okay thank you. They were all told that it was being live streamed and like it was an anonymous thing and so like you just trust him to be cognizant of that. Thanks. Hi I'm Frost I'm from the Nerdery and we also have a very large UX and IE department as well we got like 45 people that work on stuff quite a bit and I'm also kind of a bit of a usability not myself. One thing that we found not just in Drupal but in lots of different pieces of software is that on interfaces where users especially like content contributors not necessarily people who are doing CMS configuration but it could work either way is whenever there's some kind of a form they appreciate a couple things one is iconography and just some sort of small image which depicts in some sort of way what they're about to do and also the idea that when you're building content putting things together that the form that they're entering kind of matches the display that they're going to actually see and that's always a problem in Drupal because I mean by default you're getting a bunch of fields just listed from top to bottom you know your plain form. Of course in the theme layer you can rearrange things but by default that's not the way we do it so are there any suggestions on how we can get involved in fixing these sorts of things? Yeah I'll let Jen take that I just want to say user four if anyone wants to go back to the videos had the exact confusion between how data is entered into a field versus how it's displayed exactly what you're talking about. This is a really really long standing problem in Drupal Preview has never really worked exactly how we want it to and when we introduced the overlay and the admin theme and all the stuff in Drupal 7 to differentiate administrative tasks from front end tasks the content creation screen became a problem because is that an administrative task? In Drupal not really like that's outside of the admin path that's something that you can grant you know any random person can create content but a lot of times it's still shown in this administrative overlay it's an administrative theme you hit preview it's still in the administrative theme we're not even talking about layout we're talking about different fonts this is stuff that throws everybody off. So we can solve a lot of these problems more working on it there's definitely a really old issue about this that we're trying to figure out the bigger problem is layout right this is something that Drupal hasn't even solved for administrators yet let alone content creators but there's also a lot of really good work going on right now and trying to figure out how to get like edit context and so maybe you can see what the page would look like and in place editing is being talked about all of the competitions doing it it's a really hard problem for us to solve because we separate content from presentation so much which is why we have this form approach but we know it's important Being the fact that we actually can like seem that the user content entry forms but it's got to be like a separate template from the display template which means there's room for disparity there so it'd be interesting if on our theme layer if we could somehow combine both of those functionalities into a single template so that the display and the entry are kind of similar in a basic way. It's possible it's just hard and we are working on it we know people want it it's just yeah technically it's a challenge. I think there's also a danger though because what's awesome about Drupal is that it removes its content from its presentation which allows you to present the content in so many different ways in so many different contexts and that's why it's cool. It's really tough to keep communicating that when you're editing content in the same way that it's presented and so if you're editing a title of a page or something like that like are you actually editing the title of that page are you editing the menu link are you editing the title tag of that page I mean like these are all big questions that arise and if we're starting to look more towards inline editing I think it's really important that we keep on doing tests like even if it's like grab your brother put him in front of a computer for an hour and see like what he can't do like those things are so valuable because most users run into the same things over and over and over so even if you can't find the perfect person testing with somebody is better is infinitely better than testing with nobody. And especially now that Drupal 7's gotten even more complicated with its display modes like before there was just full and teaser and that was it and now you can add whatever you want and that doesn't even talk about what you've configured in views or what you've configured in panels and everything else you're pulling in individually and it's really hard for a content creator where you're like here write an article and they're like okay and then they hit preview and they only see full view right and so you're like okay well I didn't realize that when it showed up in the list of articles on the sidebar it was gonna truncate at this funny place and maybe that's not actually the teaser splitter maybe that's some like views truncate formatter and how do you preview that? So there is definitely like Drupal has rich flexible content and when you remove that from your content creators you can actually end up creating more confusion. So if we want Drupal to be more like a static page creator that in content editing works when you want Drupal to be more like Drupal it gets much harder to try and convey these issues. So if you could have like preview full mood preview sidebar preview like maybe views only use display modes now you've gotta configure those but maybe in the views you got I mean this gets really complicated but yeah you know you wanna help there's a lot of work to be done Hey. Hi I'm Michael. I also wanna say thanks for doing that because it's given us such a good resource to refer to to get some real people's stories real people's reactions their lives are sort of you know weaving through Drupal there and we get to watch it which is great it's brilliant. And one thing I just wanna throw out is that from my observations this is something I wanna turn into a more of an operating principle is that users seem to I'm not gonna say users people real people seem to look at websites from the point of view of them being on the screen they it's the stuff on the screen and it's been interesting to watch people try to deal with that try to make the screen look different and I think you actually you used you cited one example there where someone was trying to build a theme when there was no content whatsoever because and other users in the study that you did seem to be focused they would dwell on things like appearance you know the menu button for appearance because it's almost as if like it's a magnet and they just want to be there with the website that they got in their head they want it to look like that so that represents a huge challenge in terms of UX design but it's also a huge clue as to how to go about it and I think the phrase that's very powerful there is outside in if we can structure an interaction strategy from an outside in perspective for that set of users the ones that you know you were targeting there and content managers and so on content providers I think that could you know produce some useful sort of rewarding results to achieve the things that Dries is wanting us to achieve and it's more like the natural grain is like a wood pattern is like the natural grain we're not going against it that's what they want to do if we can reinforce that then I think the other thing I just want to say Jen it's that the power of Drupal is its flexibility and the fact that it's been built by developers all over the world and you know it's been very developer oriented and then there's been a user and they sort of put on top of that I think that's really the history isn't it the when you have flexibility like that then you have abstraction and abstraction is completely the opposite to what the users that you're testing the users we're trying to reach are actually seeing and thinking and believing they're doing so that's really the natural challenge how to go from abstract to the specific the concrete the thing that I can touch and if you're going outside in how do you go from the specific to the abstract it's maybe harder yeah and that's what's really interesting about the current discussions around core context and you know that's what we're gonna have to do is figure out how to use that architecture to solve that problem I think that's quite doable so just one thing have you looked at the form builder module at all it's a great way of rather than configuring fields which is the inside out approach you drag them as they are into the form and see them outside in so there's a lot of great stuff that works with any renderable so there's a big future there for how we could use that in triple two yeah I think I haven't actually seen it we'll check it out okay well form builder form builder and one more thing you were saying about well this made me think of actually we had some users who when they ended up getting into the advanced views user interface not the simple creation wizard you know like when you scroll down it'll dynamically show you what the view would be producing what the output would be they were looking at that and thinking they could look at the picture and make changes to it and affect what the content was they'd see the you know the table of all the different filters and everything you could do with views and oh I don't want to see that go down they see oh it's printing out the content and they wanted to play with that that's what they wanted to play with to make it look the way they wanted so I think yeah what you're saying is spot on reflected with that I want to add one more brief thing what you you sent or you posted something about your report yesterday I put a comment up there and I told you how I'm going to be we're actually going at my plan we're going through those same videos and we're analyzing it from a certain point of view or sets a point of view I don't want to go into that now but I also I did put a link up there to my personal site and there's a video there that I quick video that I made that just sort of summarized a project that I did a year ago that that touches on this issue I'm not going to say it's directly relevant but just while people are here I just wanted to explain that video a bit in case they do go see it using the concept of IA space which we talked about yesterday the idea that web pages consist of a set of URLs and that is very very close to that surface that those users are seeing it's the space that they're looking at what we did in this project was we we built a I wrote a module that basically built an entire website at the click of a button the website was was built on a recipe or that the information architect was derived from a recipe which was come it came from the client that said this is what I want my website to look like she was able to articulate on a napkin this is what it should look like so basically we bypassed all of that element of site building what that meant was that her target users her customers who were science fair teachers and science teachers organizing a science fair didn't have to suffer with any of that stuff they simply went to at the press of a button built the site went to the pages they wanted to go to pressed edit and put the content they wanted so we did multiple clones of this of this you know this kind of structure and it worked very well just wanted to put that in as a reference point in terms of an outside in approach from the point of content management and eliminating the site building hassle yeah awesome we haven't watched the video yet but we're really excited to see it and we're also really excited that people are taking the this videos that we put online and like actually analyzing them from completely different ways like that's very cool and we hope more people do that yeah I'll get back to you on that too I'll come up with the findings and I'll put that back in there thank you I don't actually have a question but I wanted to announce that we're going to have a boff tomorrow at 1pm to talk about usability in Drupal so if anyone is interested in conducting their own usability studies for Drupal we can talk about some strategies for planning study as well as like communicating back to the community through the groups and sites like that so well yeah 1pm room 507 thanks hi Peter Chen Stanford University first off great discussion I mean lots of directions we can go from here and just thinking more specifically about UX and usability for people who are hand dealing with the content and one of the challenges that I deal with is my so you know I've got a lot of users who are coming from the Dreamweaver paradigm and they're trying to unlearn 10 years of work with that and so similarly one of my colleagues actually is working on the library library redesign project I know chapter three has been involved so you may be familiar with that went through this first round and they're in a lot of the user training involved teaching people about you know what's a node what's a view what's all this and they found that it ended up really confusing a lot of you know librarian people and so you know they so they made it the second round they did more concerted effort to kind of figure out what are the what are the things that they actually need to learn to work with the administrative UI you know what are the things that really makes it simple and it wasn't about learning what a node is it was really about learning about what their specific domain of information is what they need to edit so that they understand that you know coming from say for example coming from the Dreamweaver paradigm they're not managing links to a single flat page you know every time because Dreamweaver is already set up to build those links with views and and et cetera or if it's something that goes in the in the menu system so so I'm working on a different project from from stew in the libraries I'm actually working in the school of engineering one of the paradigm one of the things I guess I try to do in talking with end users or content managers is trying to relate to a paradigm that the experience that they're working with right now and one of the things I do is I say look when you work with this with your manager your content it should be as easy as updating your status in Facebook that's sort of the paradigm I'm looking for and that you know rather than have them think that they're updating a node have them think that I'm updating this by writing this thing or you know putting this this piece of article in there and it goes and updates a node and that node you know produces a view here that ends up on this home page or ends up you know on this this landing page and so forth and that's really experience that I'm really aiming for with with my end users at least I'd say about 80% my end users I mean the other 20% I do want them to understand what a view and a node is and be more sophisticated so that is a really hard problem and unfortunately that problem is going to be different for every single Drupal site ever built so it's really hard for us to figure out from core like what all these possible use cases are what anyone's possible backgrounds are but it's really important for an individual site for you to figure out what that is and some of the ways that we've been dealing with that is building what we think they need from their perspective and doing a screen share and saying hey do this and watching what their instincts are and reacting with the interface and so shouldn't say node anywhere it is just like oh go add an article and if they're looking somewhere for something we put the link right there and if they're trying to interact with a content in a specific way if they use preview a lot we fix the preview problem if they're not interested in preview and they just want to look at it and edit and save we make sure the process of going from edit to save works that the edit screen looks how they want it to look and that's something that needs to be tailored specifically to your users in your website to make sure that those things match yeah so those of you who didn't hear that usability is about having a use case and Drupal has an infinite number of use cases which is part of the reason why usability is so hard for Drupal so yeah and just one sort of usability idea around that is that you know as long as your users think they know what they're doing and think they understand things it doesn't really matter if they're you know if they you know if they don't understand what a node is but they know how to create article doesn't you know what I mean like that abstraction is fine as long as they feel comfortable with it is it what's important one more thanks this is probably the most impactful usability study we've done because of the live streaming and because of you guys following through with this report and the posting of the videos and posting the list of issues this is the test that probably gave us the most reference material that we can wrap it in people's face and keep repeating thanks probably hard maybe not even to answer of the four themes do you see one that is even more worse or impactful? conceptual yeah it's it comes back to this whole mental model are you feeling comfortable thing and if people don't know what they're doing don't know what they're looking at don't know where they're supposed to go next have no idea what they're doing like why would they use Drupal yeah you know like there's no there's no reason why you would try to put yourself through this when you can just go to another you know website service that is actually specifically tailored for the function of the site that you're building you know like if you want to build a site about recipes like there's websites to help you build those yeah so one thing we are running short on time so we're just going to take these last two questions but I didn't also want to which one is the most actionable you think I mean there's a big conceptual one so I need research so conceptual is definitely the most important if it's actionable or not that depends on how we solve that problem something like the walkthrough or an intro video or there's definitely actionable items there and I think we should focus on that because if people miss the concept they're not going to understand why Drupal's awesome like Drupal is not awesome because you can create content Drupal's awesome because you can create content types and if people don't understand that you need a content type there's no reason to use Drupal at all so I think that's definitely the most important and there are things we can do about it it's going to be hard to like decide as a community what information needs to be conveyed and how you say it but it's definitely still actionable one last thing for everybody in the room that would like to get involved it's not that easy to find your place and find the spot to work on I created a post in groups.drupal.org slash usability it's the second post because your report is first which has just a say hi post comment there tell us what you would like to do and then we'll get you started thanks. Thank you. All right so we have time for one last question. I just want to say again thank you for all of this I'm very excited about the sort of introductory thing in the newspaper model I talked to whatever his name is again thank you so bad with names I'm very excited about that and I will start following on that group and try to contribute to that I just wanted to follow up a little bit on on Peter's thing and then your guys answer to that about you know that we have to sort of have there's a sort of a distinction between the usability for that we're kind of you know this was really aimed at which is like somebody installing Drupal and then trying to build a site with it as opposed to the cases where you know like which many of us do is we're building a site for somebody or helping them build us you know a site where the end users they don't need to know that it's Drupal and I think that's something that all of us of site builders and developers need to remember is that when we build things it's our responsibility to make sure that the user finds it easy and that they can not have to know anything about Drupal yeah very well said thank you yeah and so if anybody has any we'd love feedback on the mox or the AD even having something like this so please comment online or come and talk to us or come to the boff about it tomorrow tomorrow at one at tomorrow at one right tomorrow at one because yeah like clearly it's not super easy to get things in core but we'd love to see we'd love to see what people's thoughts are about this yeah thank you thank you