Submitted by Michael on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 - 05:13.
While the blood is still drying under my fingernails, I want to take a moment to talk about why scaling the ramparts of Drupal's administrative user interface was such a difficult task for me as a new user.
I am a big fan of Drupal which is an open source content management system used to create dynamic web sites. It has a considerable amount of power and flexibility that, owing to a brilliant architecture, allows its central core to be enhanced by countless task specific modules.
As an open source system, the core and peripheral modules are all created and maintained by a veritable army of dedicated volunteers around the world. In addition to its highly flexible 'theming' system that allows web sites to take on virtually any aesthetic design, Drupal has a well entrenched system of semi-automatically generating user interfaces for administrative tasks.
Most end users don't see this administrative interface unless they happen to have the role of managing a web site's content. But it is here that we know that many usability issues arise.
While the system of creating administrative user interfaces presents attractive advantages to the module developer, it appears to fall far short of the needs of actual administrative users.
It's worth analysing this system and asking some blunt, usability engineering questions. What is the nature of the methodology used to generate administrative UIs? Is the developer convenience justified, given the impact on end users? What, if any, alternative is there that might alleviate the usability obstacles?
These are important questions but not easy to answer. As part of my deepening involvement with Drupal I've written an article that launches an investigation into these questions. More will follow.
