[drupal-docs] Usability guidelines

[Chris Messina]

Hmmm. Well, I can tell that the wiki idea isn't popular, at least
among two or three folks here. But I'd be interested in hearing from
more UI/Theme developers! :)

To support the wiki, I have specifically talked in person with Jeffrey
Veen, Doug Bowman, Jason Fried, Dunstan Orchard, James Walkah and Matt
Mullenweg and they all seem to think that it's the only plausible
arragements for getting their participation (they're busy folks after
all!). I'm open to alternatives, but think that the wiki would need to
be fairly specific (sorry Boris!), with the purpose of creating
non-Drupal specific GUI guidelines for open source CMS-style systems.
That there is a learning curve moving from one CMS/blog software to
another, IMHO, is many ways self-defeating and frustrating, especially
for the OS community. There should be a clear migration path from
WordPress to Drupal and I think that we would both stand to benefit if
there was closer cooperation between our communities.

In fact, I discussed this idea with Matt Mullenweg the other
night--about how it would be great to be able to create a theme that
worked in both WordPress AND Drupal. He thought it was a pretty
interesting idea and would love to talk about it more. Kubrick is the
one example of a cross-CMS theme and in many ways, the Drupal version
makes you envious of its WordPress counterpart!

. . .

See, you can't just "get more people to create themes". It's a chicken
and egg problem. I'd love for more designers to create more themes,
but it's just not easy enough yet, nor is there an obvious Path of
Least Resistance (tm). What documentation exists isn't all that
helpful, in my experience, so it's not easy for me to get rallied up
to convince my designer buddies to pitch in. This is where the
meltdown with Dunstan happened earlier this fall: we met in a cafe
with the intention of getting him up-to-speed on theme design... and
at the end of it, it was so obvious that he'd be wasting effort
because of the lack of control he perceived over the code, that he
decided it wasn't worth his time.

The wiki idea is to ameliorate this situation and provide a way for
designers, in designer-speak, to come together and discuss CMS
interface concepts and best practices (as well as, possibly, themes
i.e. color choices, accessibility issues, etc). From there, Drupal
guidelines could be extrapolated and each Drupal interface could be
reconsidered. Right now, the paradigm seems to favor developers over
designers in Drupal-land. That's an historic and cultural attribute.
In order to appeal to more designers and get them designing themes,
there needs to be a subtle shift -- an olive branch, if you will,
suggesting that Drupal developers are ready to listen and be served by
hungry designer-types!

Just to illustrate, the node creation form should be able to be
designed for different node types. This is a major failure of Drupal's
design in my experience so far. That there is no distinction between
creating a blog entry, book page and forum post, IMHO, creates many
more problems than it solves from a usability perspective. I should
have control over what the user sees -- after all, that's my job. Not
having that control limits my effectiveness and ultimately makes it
extremely difficult for me to improve upon what Drupal provides.

Another problem exists in the quality and semantic rigor of the code
that Drupal produces. You can have all the validating code you want
and still not have code that a themer can make sense of or add style
to. I give you one key example: there is no div with an id of
"preview" wrapped around a previewed node. How else can I style
something as a "preview" if I don't have the markup I need to style
it?!

My own practice thus far has been to maintain a personal wiki on my
local machine documenting various UI ideas and general gripes with
Drupal. I would love to make this public and have other designers read
and vote on my ideas. If we had a meritocratic system like Drupal does
for patches and modules, the best UI design ideas would rise to the
top rather quickly. And we could then create a downloadable PDF that
comes with each Drupal release that contains the most recent best
practices and guidelines for developing Drupal interfaces and themes.

If I wasn't already snowed under with my CivicSpace work (and Spread
Firefox distractions), I'd go ahead and get a wiki started on my own.
So then the question is, what support from the Drupal community can I
expect to receive for this kind of project and what, if any,
alternatives, would you suggest for attaining the kind of guidelines
we're discussing here?

Chris


On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:34:31 +0100, Dries Buytaert <dries at buytaert.net> wrote:
> Chris Messina wrote:
> > This is absolutely needed. I think that we should create a wiki for
> > this kind of thing. In fact, I talked to Veen and Doug Bowman about
> > this and they agreed that they'd help with a wiki. Thus is we can
> > create something like cmsdesignwiki.com, we could really get this
> > going.
> 
> Creating and maintaining a cmsdesignwiki.com sounds like an aweful lot
> of work for what we're trying to achieve.  It's a project on its own.
> 
> A cmsdesignwiki.com is nice and dandy but in the end we need a set of
> Drupal specific guidelines with Drupal specific examples.
> 
> That and I'm not sure a wiki would work -- you don't want everyone and
> his dog to add random guidelines, or change guidelines set in stone by
> people like Veen or Bowman.
> 
> --
> Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/
>