Over the past year, the Drupal community has focused on improving the Drupal user experience, making Drupal more friendly to a less technical user-base and rolling those improvements into Drupal 7. Join Dries Buytaert, the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform and Jeff Noyes, Acquia's director of user experience and contributor to the D7UX team contributor, for a one-hour tour of the new Drupal 7 usability features and the driving forces behind them. This will be the first in a series of Drupal 7 Webinars hosted by Dries this year.

1. Making Drupal 7 Simple to Use
for Everyone
Dries Buytaert Jeff Noyes Lynne Capozzi
Drupal founder, Acquia CTO Director of User Experience Vice President Marketing
Acquia Acquia Acquia
@dries @jeffnoyes @bryanhouse

2. Housekeeping
Can you hear us? Raise your hand in WebEx
Unable to listen via your computer’s audio
– Request phone access

3. Housekeeping
Today’s webinar is being recorded. Slides and
recording will be posted in next 24 hours at:
– http://acquia.com/community/resources/recorded_webinars
Submit questions via WebEx, we’ll answer as many
as we can at end
–Give it a try & tell us where you joining from today

4. Upcoming Webinars
Thursday February 18th
–How Open Source Frameworks for Social Publishing
Eliminate WCM Shortfalls
Thursday February 25th
- Preview of Drupal Gardens - 15 Minutes from Design
to Online
Register Today - http://acquia.com/webinars

5. Introduction
Dries Buytaert
–Founder and Project Lead, Drupal
–President, Drupal Association
–Co-founder & CTO, Acquia
Jeff Noyes
–Director of User Experience, Acquia

6. 6
How did we get here?

7. Choosing the Right Technology
A Social Publishing Platform
Drupal “… is as much a Social Software platform
as it is a web content management system.”
content users
CMS Watch, The Web CMS Report 2009
blogs /
workflow wikis
forums /
taxonomy comments
Content Social
Mgmt Software
semantic Systems Tools social
ranking
web
social
RSS tagging
social
analytics
networks

8. Overview
Drupal’s perceived as being hard to use.

9. Usability lab testing
Several formal lab tests between March 2008/2009
conducted to answer these questions...
– What are the main challenges to new Drupal users?
– Is the language and terminology intuitive to users?
– How long does it take users to perform basic web
development tasks with no formal Drupal training
– Do recent design changes work
(password checker, vertical tabs, etc

10. Lab test results can’t be ignored
Lots of vernacular confusion Page vs Story, Content vs Content
type, Primary Links, etc.
Inability to find content after creating it
Mental model of creating pages not expected
Users expected WYSIWYG vs.
“input format”
Unable to distinguish
administrative layer
Overwhelming administrative page
Menu confusion with
parent item

11. A usability team is born
Evolving team of 8-16 people
join forces to help make Drupal
easier. Two people stand out.
Roy Scholten (A.K.A Yoroy) for
sound design insights.
Bojhan Summers for staying
on top of the issues, rounding
up the troops & beating the
UX drum.

12. Acquia hires Mark Boulton

13. D7ux.org

14. Microprojects
Overall information architecture
Shortcuts
Media manager
Appearance
Dashboard
Profile
Forums
Watchdog
Triggers
Pathauto
and more...

15. 15
Drupal 7’s
user experience goal

16. Drupal 7’s user experience goals
Make the most frequent tasks easy and less
frequent tasks achievable.
Design for the 80%
Privilege the Content Creator
Make the default settings smart

17. 17
Drupal 7’s
usability highlights

18. Who benefits?
Content Managers
–People that spend most of their time
managing content, e.g. writers, editors
etc.
Designers & Developers
–People that spend most of their time
building & theming sites.

19. Usability highlights
Simplifying the content managers role.

20. Simplified startup options
Users can now start with a common set of
pre-configured features, or take the
advanced route and start from scratch.

21. Password verify made
more clear
Users now have a better experience setting
site credentials.

22. Appearance
Information architecture
Improvements
More concrete categories for a clearer map
of the Drupal system. - Emphasis on basic
CMS tasks (content, structure, people etc)
and pushed advance config a layer deeper
(80/20)

23. Appearance
Recently added content
made easier to find.
Users can now find recently added content
by clicking “content”

24. Point-and-click edit.
Users can now edit content more quickly
and configure blocks more quickly.

25. Add shortcuts
Quickly add shortcuts to your most used
locations.
Shortcuts
Accelerate by creating shortcuts to most
used destinations - by role

26. Admin layer Site layer
Overlay...
Clear separation of front—and back—end
tasks..

27. Sitewide dashboard
Users now have a customizable dashboard.

28. D7
Clearer content/help text
Rewrote/removed copy – making Drupal more
friendly and concise. Focused on making help
more helpful.
D6

29. Reorganized Forms
Redesigned fieldsets and compressed forms by
using vertical tabs.

30. Primary actions
separated from tabs
Adding content used be in the same
location as browsing lists of existing
content.

31. Usability highlights
Designer & developer simplifications.

32. Redesigned appearance
Applying a theme is now modernized and
easier to understand which theme is active

33. Adding features (modules)
workflow improved
Modules now have direct links to permissions
and configuration settings. Outdated
modules can be updated within Drupal.

34. Clearing cache more
accessible.
Developers and themers can now clear cache
without having to scroll.

35. Upgrade manager
Modules with newly released revisions can
now be updated without leaving Drupal.

36. 36
Drupal Gardens

37. Built on Drupal 7
Built to help people get over the hurdle of installing
Drupal and figuring out which modules to use.

38. WYSIWYG
Content can now be formatted

39. Media support
Media can be uploaded, reused, or added
from third party vendors like Flickr

40. 40
Drupal 8 wish list...

41. More testing & solid metrics
Drupal Gardens will
become a platform for
user testing and getting
access to usage data.

42. Page improvements
Improve Drupal’s page model
User think about pages top down - add a page, give it a layout, add widgets, add
content.

43. Block improvements
Drag and drop features
Eliminate need to duplicate blocks to place in different regions
Drop here

44. Module administration improvements
Too much scrolling. Too often you have to click to enable/disable,
scroll way down, submit. Repeat.

45. Easier form creation
Building & styling forms should be easier. Form Builder should be
advanced

46. Content types
Creating content types and managing fields could be improved
Drop here

47. Interaction Guidelines
Interaction standards should emerge to answer questions like:
– Best practice use of:
tabs
wizards
buttons
drag & drop
forms & form elements
etc.
– Accessibility standards
– Help standards

48. 48
Summary

49. Thanks!
D7 will be a huge step forward!
The Drupal community should be proud of its
accomplishments. We’re proud!

50. If you want to help Drupal get better...
To help Drupal.org...
http://drupal.org/node/704062
To help Drupal...
http://drupal.org/contribute

51. We’re Hiring!
Do you love working with Drupal?
If so, Acquia is hiring:
–Engineering & design
–Client advisors and consulting
–Inside sales
Check out openings at
http://acquia.com/careers

52. Questions
For more information:
– http://acquia.com Recording of today’s event and slides
– http://twitter.com/acquia will be posted at:
http://acquia.com/community/resources/
– http://twitter.com/drupal recorded_webinars
Contact Acquia:
– 888.9.ACQUIA
– sales@acquia.com
Try Drupal 7
– Sign up for beta code at http://drupalgardens.com
– Download at http://drupal.org/project/drupal
Download Acquia’s Drupal Stack Installers
– http://acquia.com/download
– Available for Debian, Ubuntu, Windows & Mac