[drupal-devel] User experience research plan for administration
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. Cheers, Kieran
Kieran Lal wrote:
Here is the general outline of the plan. [snip] *1) Conduct Audience research* *[snip]* *3) Develop prototype interfaces and iteratively test with users *
[snip] 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.
A daunting task indeed. I am sure your experts know of this commercial package, but it is worth putting on the table: http://techsmith.com/products/morae/default.asp TechSmith has been around for years, having grown their company from the success of Snagit, a screen capture utility. We regularly use Camtasia for streaming audio/slide presentations, etc. Camtasia is, bar none, brilliant and worth every cent even if you pay full price. As a non-profit R&D lab we got a discount. The educational discounts are even better. Morae is more expensive than Camtasia by a factor of about four, but it is designed exactly for what you are describing above. I have never used Morae, but hope to someday soon as we'll be doing something similar to the above in our applied research. So while I cannot speak to Morae directly, I can say that Camtasia is brilliant and worth far more than it costs. --Sohodojo Jim-- -- Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky Founders and Research Directors Sohodojo - http://sohodojo.com
participants (2)
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Kieran Lal -
Sohodojo Jim