<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Jul 26, 2006, at 12:05 AM, Kristjan Jansen wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Can we sit back for a while and say: what is the reason to have admin pages? what does admins do on those pages mostly? Is it for monitoring how your site is doing? Tinkering settings? Administering content or users?</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">(some answers are here:</FONT></P><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><A href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1425065&U=142506581557">http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1425065&U=142506581557</A>)</BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV>I think it's important to take a step back and figure out what administrators goals, and expectations are. A lot of people talk about small UI improvements when trying to improve the administration user experience. e.g. Have you seen the AJAX in WORDPRESS, OMG!!!! :-)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>However, our research indicated that people were spending upwards of 40 hours in upgrading their site including debugging, managing new feature requests, training their users, and porting custom modules to new APIs. We tried to help improve that with documentation: <A href="http://drupal.org/upgrade/tutorial-introduction">http://drupal.org/upgrade/tutorial-introduction</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Our research also indicated that 83% of Drupal administrators looked for new features. So we did this: <A href="http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category">http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The point is we need to get big pieces like improving the upgrading process or module categorization in place, particularly if they are not bound by the Drupal distribution development process, before we dive into small UI improvements. Let me know if you want to collaborate on another set of interviews and a administration survey.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Cheers,</DIV><DIV>Kieran</DIV></BODY></HTML>