UX Sprint : The plan

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.

Topics

We will work in teams of three to four individuals - who have different skills sets that complement each other. Each team will work on one topic. We developed a list of issues per topic, going from easy to very difficult to avoid getting stuck on issues that need more discussion.

All of our activities at the UX-sprint will be directly be posted in the issue queue, to allow virtual sprinters to contribute, we'll need your reviews.

We will tackle the following topics :

Menus
Creating a menu item is mainly troubled by lack of connection with the actual page you are linking to, we will work on many issues regarding validation and optimizing the menu's listing page.

Blocks
The current interaction of Blocks is optimized for moving a lot of blocks around, but not particularly for just adding one block. We will work on patches, to optimize the first-time experience of adding a block.

Taxonomy
The taxonomy interface has been left untouched for many years, while categorizing your content is a fundamental task., We will work on a number of critical issues that keep people from learning how Taxonomy works..

Text
Our users are task driven and time starved, yet we give them descriptions that need a lot of thought to understand. We will work on removing and rewriting descriptions that don't get their main point across.

Modules
The current mockups for the module page still leave a lot of issues left untouched. We will work conceptually on improving the experience of installing and managing modules.

If you happen to run into issues regarding these topics, make sure to contact me this week - any other suggestions are welcome as well.

Attendees

We have an amazing group of attendees, from developers, javascripters, interaction designers to copy writers. We have Leisa Reichelt, Mark Boulton,Gabor Hojtsy, Erik Stielstra (sutharsan), Bojhan Somers (bojhan), Roy Scholten (yoroy), Bart Feenstra (Xano), Gaele Strootman (gaele), Kristjan Jansen (kika), Thomas Moseler (eigentor), Konstantin Kaefer (kkaefer), Philip Vergunst (skilip), Willem Mol (Whatdoesitwant), Berend de Boer (berend), Maarten Verbaarschot (mverbaar), Johannes Haseitl (derhasi), Steve De Jonghe (seutje), Clemens Tolboom (clemens.tolboom).

We still have room for about 5 more attendees, please get in contact with me or Roy Scholten if you wish to come.

Sponsors

We are looking for sponsors to cover some of the transportation, a few places to sleep + food and drinks for 25 people. Chipin if you can or contact Roy Scholten