[development] WordPress' project Shuttle: Administration redesignproject

[Bèr Kessels]

Op maandag 15 mei 2006 17:52, schreef Jeff Eaton:
> CAN all be shoehorned into a single workflow, a single dashboard,
> but I think the experience will suffer greatly. WordPress has the luxury
> of focusing exclusively on blogging.

Nail on the head!

There are obvious parts that can be improved in Drupal. we can improve some 
usability issues a lot with simple lines of code. 

But we cannot (IMNSO) and should not (IMELHO (...Even Less...) take this route 
of mac-cing the stuff up.

Things like this great (in some ways) admin interface are really only usefull 
and handy when you can focus on one single task and audience. 

We cannot. And should not. From what I see in all the screenies, we will have 
to give in a GREAT amount of flexibility and thus modularity to achieve this 
kind of "usability". That is a sacrifice that we, IMHO should not even 
*consider* to make. Not even in a theme. Because next thing is that such a 
theme becomes "the" theme. And next thing is that Drupal is ready for only 
one subset of users, with all the other users either abandoning it, or 
saying, fskit, ill start me own Flexral. 

With all respect to the Civicspace development and great stuff, too. They are 
but one of the subsets of users too. So even all the outcomes of their 
usability reviews should be looked at as being "only a solution for a small 
part of our audience". Really great would it be to get Bryght in this too. 
Because from what I heard from Boris, the "Biggest Thing" acc. to Bryght was 
the fact that WYSIWYG is not tied to core too hard. Or when it comes to my 
experience, the very fact that making an "about us" section requires one to 
get into the material (handbooks, howtouse book module etc), could improve 
Drupal A LOT.

IMO getting into this fancypancy Macish (as in "looking good in the first 
place") stuff is not bad. But IMO we can improve a LOT more in MUCH simpler 
ways by getting Drupal a tad more consistant and slightly more obvious for 
certain tasks.

Bèr

NB: When I talk about "macish" I am not trying to insult any kind of 
OS/PC/Whatever user. I use this term only because Mac has a huge amount of 
fancy pancy boingboing swooshey effects. Stuff that is Cool. But does not 
really add to the usabilty. The real (and IMO best ever) usabilty with mac, 
lies in the fact that it Does What One Expects It To Do. Not with the fact 
that an icon bounces around your screen and then dissapears with a swoosh and 
a puff. I really hope that Drupal devels can see through this. And see that 
making Drupal more usable is not the same as adding more 
eyecandy-swooshey-poof-effects. But that those effects might (might!) be used 
in addition (in addition!) to great usability improvements. To make it even 
better then Just Very Good.