Hello, we have put together a team of professional user experience leaders and members of the Drupal and CivicSpace community to start a major push to improve the user experience of administration in Drupal. I'd like to introduce Peter Van Dijck, author of Information Architecture for Designers and Bob Goodman a user experience professional and User Experience Network ambassador for Boston. Peter and Bob will be advising us in this effort to improve Drupal administration. Dries will be leading the effort for Drupal administration re-design and I'll be leading the effort for CivicSpace which is a distribution of Drupal with contributed modules(and much more!). Charlie Lowe who heads the Drupal documentation team and is a lecturer at Purdue university will be advising with audience research, a discipline in which he has expertise.

Here is the general outline of the plan.

1) Conduct Audience research

1.1) Identify a subset of users for live voice interviews or email interviews.

1.2) Based on the analysis of the the interviews above, create a broad survey for audience research.

1.3) Make a list of problem areas/goals of the redesign and prioritize.

2) Develop Information architecture for new administration interface.

3) Develop prototype interfaces and iteratively test with users

Dries will be traveling for the next few weeks so I'll be coordinating the audience research for both Drupal and CivicSpace and report progress back to him at a presentation in Portland. Drupal currently has 31 modules and CivicSpace has over 60 so this is a long term project. We will need help in many areas. In particular, we are interested in people who can conduct voice interviews for around 60 minutes to help in this first phase. We require help with developing site maps, wireframes, flow diagrams, and functional notes. Finally, we are going to require distributed video and audio capture set-up so that our usability testers can interact with users around the world and see in real time the issues users experience. People with skills in setting up video and audio capture can help.

Everyone if very excited about this project and we look forward to having broad participation with the community.