Drupal 8 development has been underway for some time now and we're seeing increased activity around issues that aim to improve Drupal usability.

What's been missing is an overview of where we should focus our time and energy when tackling Drupal user experience challenges. This post provides an outline of the topics we want to focus on to make Drupal 8 great.

In a nutshell, we want to:

• Kick off some essential core UX design projects in the next months.
• We will work on the content creation experience, fields UI and extending Drupal.
• And last, we want to position the default profile(s) of Drupal core, and define a community-driven framework for making decisions on their directions.

One of our biggest challenges, is that we lack developers who are involved in each of these topics. We learned, that the best way to get great developers ready and willing to contribute to UX initiatives are, is when there are well-researched, solid design proposals. So lets all start there.

After an intense Drupal 7 period, the UX Team is starting work on the exciting new UX challenges in Drupal 8.

In Drupal 7 you are now able to install modules and themes using the interface. This opens the possibility for contrib to create a browser of projects.

Quickly access configuration of blocks, menus and more. A new design pattern in Drupal 7.

I presented on my experience doing UX work in the Drupal community: the challenges and opportunities we have towards creating a more richer design community.

At Drupalcamp Stockholm I presented on Drupal 7UX. I was able to share some of the important changes, and what we have learned in the process.

We are now in the User Experience, Accesiblity and Performance phase in the Drupal 7 development cycle. The focus is on small user experience changes.

We are nearing the end of the Drupal 7 UX Project which has been exciting, challenging and frustrating from time to time.

I would like to reflect on the process so far, and hope to create an open dialog about how we can learn from this project to power future efforts in Drupal.

The sprint organizers set me the challenging task of coming up with the sprint content for next weeks UX sprint. After spending a day with Roy Scholten - we created a setup that should tackle a large amount of issues. The sprint will focus on usability issues we found at the Usability Test in February. The total sum of all these issues causes a lot of frustration for new users.

With all the current efforts around D7UX, we will align any solutions we come up with those efforts. However  it is an important distinction to make that we won't work on D7UX implementation. Instead, we are working on the core Drupal interfaces that are currently not touched by D7UX but,  as the last three usability tests have shown, desperately need improvement.