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Landing on Planet Drupal (or trying to)
By Micha | May 13, 2008
It’s been just almost a year since I focused my professional attention onto usability for web applications and launched this web site. I’ve known for about eleven-and-a-half months that, as a hybrid between a blog and a business web site, this site has significant issues. My goal was to see if I could mix my personal perspectives with a professional profile. The experiment is over and I’m not afraid to say it’s a problematic mix and change is required.
Looking at it from a writer’s (i.e. end user’s) point of view, the problem all along has been deciding which ‘voice’ to use – the one that likes to push TUAG’s services or the one that is just passionate about usability issues? The logical decision is to let this site function as a soap box for user advocacy. So that means I need another web site.
And a new site I shall have. Eventually.
I’ve chosen to use the Drupal content management system as the basis for my new business web site. I’ve been orbiting around Drupal for as long as this blog has existed. But on my first approach to it I bounced right out of its dense atmosphere and decided to create my first major web app with my own custom made content management system.
Lately I’ve been taking another look at Drupal, coming at it slowly and more directly with an intent to get my head seriously around it. For the last couple of months I’ve been studying it closely, mostly from the code level, and getting some insight into its strengths, and weaknesses. Progress has been very slow and I would have to honestly say it’s to a large extent because the Drupal administrative user interface has significant issues.
Drupal is an open source framework for building dynamic web sites that has been built by dedicated engineers from all over the planet. It has a brilliant core architecture that, among other things, provides tremendous flexibility in the site presentation – i.e. what it looks like.
But shaping a given web site in Drupal is not an easy matter for the novice. Surrounding the Drupal core is its administrative user interface, a veritable asteroid belt of usability hazards. Much of this outer ring is functional debris emanating from the many moons, or ‘modules’, that orbit the main body. Here, nothing is simple because nothing is connected. Interface components float randomly everywhere, ready to tear through one’s productivity as if it were wet tissue.
Not surprisingly, beyond the asteroid belt there is a calm zone where countless Drupal web sites exist in a state of near identical placidity. In this zone one can hear the whispers of end users and clients asking their web developers “But can you make it look less … Drupally?”
Drupal’s difficulties are not unlike those found in so many other software development projects. In both the web and desktop worlds, software development frequently begins with functionality first, thus leaving the user interface design until much later – typically when screams are heard from the far outreaches of the end user domain.
Having spent 20 years or so working on both sides of the usability/engineering divide I could talk a lot about this phenomenon. For now I’ll just say that functionality created in a vacuum of usability requirements always produces a problematic mix of values. The potential for a confusion through the collision of multiple perspectives is indeed serious. It’s not a question of anyone being at fault - it’s just a state of evolution that can be surmounted with intelligence and good planning.
The discussions happening at Drupal.org seem to demonstrate that there is a growing awareness of this within the Drupal community. That is what impresses me. As a newcomer to the open source universe, I’m pleasantly surprised by the intelligence, civility and democracy in play here. It is certainly motivating me to roll up my own sleeves and pitch in.
I’ll leave other points for subsequent posts. Now that I’m officially booting out the ‘professional profile’ requirement from this site, it’s finally free to become a plain old blog and speak directly from the user advocate’s corner. In the meantime when that other site is launched, you’ll be the first to know.
Topics: user interface design, blogging, usability, connectedness, community, systems, user experience, functional design, design simplicity, Drupal, open source |
May 14th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Well thought out introduction to a broader discussion. I look forward to participating on these issues with you.
As an interesting side note, this commenting form has some usability issues of its own. For instance, on my Mac using FF, it would seem I cannot tab from field to field or within the larger text field, use carriage returns. Odd, don’t you think?
May 14th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Thanks William. Looking forward also to good discussions on this.
Hmmm. I just tried the tab thing and it works ok on IE for Windows. I’ll try FF … yep, that works too. The finger is pointing at your Mac!
May 15th, 2008 at 1:39 am
The ramp up time sounds wasteful and the asteroid belt sounds messy. There’s no other open source content management system that’s better designed?
I commend your willingness to work on its design.
(I’m running FF on Mac OS X and have no problem tabbing between fields, and carriage returns work, too. I’ve seen FF bugs where tabs and CRs don’t work, fixed by restarting the browser.)