Karen McGrane » Drupal

Improving the Drupal Admin Interface

Karen McGrane — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:23:18 +0000

Be careful what you wish for — good advice! In working with various content management systems, I’ve always wanted the chance to improve the user experience. But actually getting the opportunity to do so uncovered much more complexity than I’d even dreamed.

For me, the biggest challenge was in bridging the gap between what the users of Buzzr would expect to do, and how the Drupal admin interface actually works. It’s possible to do so much in Drupal if you’re a trained professional — but is it possible to enable ordinary people to take advantage of what Drupal has to offer?

The three areas of greatest conceptual difficulty for the user (from my perspective) are:

1. Confusing overlap among blocks, pages, templates, and features
For a user (even a relatively experienced user) trying to set up a new site or manage an existing one, configuring “what you want on your website” first starts with deciding what goes in the navigation. But what are those things? Are they features (“blog” or “wiki”) that might have any number of pages associated with them? Are they static pages, or are they dynamic containers? Is it clear what it means to choose a template layout like “gallery view”? If they choose to show information in the sidebar, do those blocks appear on every page?

2. Confusing overlap between page layout and page design
When a user thinks about “designing” the site or choosing a “theme”, what does she mean? Is it the colors and the typography? Is it the underlying column and grid structure? The placement of the navigation bar? What about the categories and types of pages that go in the navigation? Even though I’ve dealt with these very issues every day at work for nearly 15 years, it’s not always clear to me — and certainly wasn’t clear-cut to our users.

3. Confusing overlap between navigation and views
The ability to create custom views of content is one of Drupal’s strengths. Communicating that capability to a site administrator so she can set up her own filters can be tricky. How do you explain that some navigation elements are views on the same content (products filtered by product type, or posts filtered by location, for example) and some navigation options are to static page templates?

We puzzled through these issues for quite some time, and I know we’ve made good progress. But we’re focusing on the needs of one particular type of user. Solving these issues to meet the needs of the wide range of people who use the Drupal admin interface is vastly more complex.

Introducing Buzzr

Karen McGrane — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:44:12 +0000

I met the team from Lullabot through Ed Sussman, who was our client (jointly) on a project to redesign FastCompany.com. About a year ago we all teamed up to begin working on a new product that we called “Project Codename.”

Lullabot brought their expertise in Drupal, my company Bond Art + Science brought our skills in user experience and interaction design, and Ed brought his experience with managing and monetizing large scale web properties. A kick-ass team, if I’ve ever seen one.

Some of the things that made this complex project really fun for me to work on:

Getting my hands on a CMS interface
Over the years, I’ve worked on products based on many different content management systems, including all kinds of “homegrown,” Vignette, Interwoven, Sharepoint, Fatwire, Movable Type, WordPress, Joomla, and, yes, Drupal. And while I’ve had the opportunity to make changes to some admin interfaces like content entry templates, I’ve never had the chance to redesign an entire administrative interface. But boy, have I wanted to.

Look Ma! No clients!
I’ve been making websites for clients since 1995, and I do love working in client services. That said, it’s been a real delight to work on an in-house project. Having the freedom (and the burden) to make design decisions free from client organizational politics and compromises has been a welcome opportunity.

Iterative design and development process
Working as a hired gun, time to iterate can often be a luxury the client isn’t willing to pay for. Often we’re hired as a user experience team separate from development, which means we focus more on lo-fi or front-end prototypes. And we’re sometimes not around to participate in any experimentation with or changes to designs that happen during development. Being able to go from week to week, trying out different ideas and having them brought to life was my favorite part of the process.

We continue to iterate and develop the product, but we thought it was time to share the product with the community.

Introducing Buzzr.com!

(And I give thanks to the community, specifically Jen Simmons, for helping with the embed code.)

Creating Usable Websites: Do It With Drupal!

Karen McGrane — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:53:07 +0000

Jeff Robbins of Lullabot asked if I’d speak about ways Drupal developers can learn more about user experience and make more usable websites at their Do It With Drupal conference, held in New Orleans in December 2008.

Since “making more usable websites” is a pretty broad topic, I decided to focus the talk on interaction design patterns, and the many libraries that exist to guide people in making design decisions. This got me thinking about a pattern library that could live on Drupal.org, which I think would be a good way for people to share design solutions and code.