Update from Drupal UX testingAngie "webchick" Byron

Acquia Build Week August 18, 2015

About the participants• 7 participants

• All front-end or back-end developers

• 5 of them had used Drupal 7 before (but not D8)

• All experienced site builders (Joomla!, WordPress, HTML/PHP)

• In short, these were our people. Not random people off the street, not content authors, but people in Drupal's direct target audience.

About the scenarios• All worded in such a way that Drupal-specific terminology was

not present:

• Create a piece of content

• Add a link to a page in the menu

• Create a content type (session) with fields

• Create a session, both desktop + mobile

• Edit content inline

• Place an existing block

http://tiny.cc/umn-scenarios

Help deks

What's working well?

Drupal 8++• Mobile experience was impressive

• WYSIWYG worked as well as expected

• Content previews, accessible form errors presented no issues

• New menu link autocomplete performed much better compared to previous tests

• Same with re-skin of the Seven theme

What's not working well?

Terminology

“If all you use is Drupal, you're not going to be able to make any

other kind of website.”

Mental model: front-to-back

“In WordPress, you don't have to figure out how to place your

block inside your view inside your region inside your homepage.”

Example task #1: Place a block

1

2

3

4

Example task #2: Create a session

“This seems like a jumbled up hardware store with no

wayfinding.”

Oh, great! Forms!

One help desk call later…

Oh, great! Forms!

So far so good…

• TOO. MANY. OPTIONS. (regression from D7)

• "Boolean" (rare) at top of list.

• Text (common) "below the fold."

• People are looking for words like "checkboxes," "drop-downs" here.(regression from D7)

This page = fail. :(

What they really want is to see this, and add fields to it.

Spark-related stuff

Create content harder to find;

shortcuts hidden by default

NO ONE found in-place editing. :(

Sometimes the "friendly pencil"

leads you somewhere horrifying. :P

What are we gonna do about it?

Recommendations: pre-8.0.0 release

• Fix regressions in the block UI (thanks, Tim!)

• Field UI improvements

• Make quick edit discoverable

• Bang out stupid kinks in WYSIWYG

• Some sort of short "intro" video that ships with D8 to explain obscure terminology / how things fit together

http://tiny.cc/umn-issues

Recommendations: 8.1.x+

• Drag/drop blocks

• Configurable layouts

• Previews for ALL the things

• Sample content in default install (snowman)

• Draft UI

http://tiny.cc/umn-issues

Recommendations: 9.x

• Perform terminology review and rename all of our obscure words for things. Seriously. It's the #1 thing that steers people away from Drupal.

• Change all of core's admin UIs to "front-end first" to match users' "front to back" mental models

http://tiny.cc/umn-issues

See you there!https://www.drupal.org/node/2497361