Drupal7 UX - 4 weeks and counting

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.

At least that is the idea. We have had major user interface patches committed just recently with the intention of "fixing" the user experience issues afterwards. Given this situation, we still need to make some big changes.

This post outlines what needs to be done in this phase. With our unrealistic time schedule of 1.5 month (only 4 weeks now) to clean up 18 months worth of new functionality, we need to ensure to spend time on the right issues.

I have listed the most important issues per topic.

Fields in core

We put the old CCK interface into Drupal core, with minimal changes to its interface. The interactions and workflows in the CCK interface need work. Because this is such a fundamental "Site Building" tool, we need to ensure it is usable for more novice users.

#553328: Streamline field UI workflow
#552620: [meta-issue] Rewrite descriptions of content types UI
#553300: [meta-issue] Improve user-facing Field terminology
#552654: Manage Fields and Display Fields links from the Content Types operation table

Dashboard

The experience of using the Dashboard is vital for Drupal, because this is the first thing administrators will see. The initial commit of the Dashboard contained no widgets (blocks), so we still need to create good default widgets for the Dashboard. Apart from that, customizing your Dashboard is still difficult because we haven't worked on any of those interactions from a UX perspective yet.

#569190: D7UX: Dashboard contents
#623326: Design all interactions for customizing dashboard contents
#614410: Patterns for recent-items-blocks on the dashboard
#430886: Make custom blocks fieldable

Edit links everywhere

This interaction opens a whole new world of possibilities, allowing administrators to more easily edit menus, blocks and more. However, we still have to create a UI that is understandable and able to handle modules adding their links to this interaction.

#601150: Improved UI for contextual links

IA, text, search and more…

Because we shifted our focus to mostly D7UX related issues in the last few months, we still have a lot of loose ends left in Drupal's administration. Each of these are similarly critical to D7UX, since in every release we have to keep improving existing features on known usability issues.

#504012: Index content when created
#396478: Searchable modules page
#594660: Rename menus in default profile
#301902: Allow more users to see the node admin page
#598758: Modules page: add link to its settings page for each module
#591682: Create more default categories on "Configuration and Modules" page

With all these incredible new features, it's still very important that people can actually use them. Since the devil is in the details, we need to work more on the issues outlined above. The UX-Team is available for feedback in #drupal-usability (on freenode.net IRC) and per mail.

If you have suggestions, or feel that an issue is missing don't hesitate to comment.