understanding technology

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.

I recently jumped ship on a project that seemed destined to hit the rocky shores of missed deadlines and then sink in the swirling eddies of communication breakdown. I wasn't on board for long - about a week and a half really - but during that time I spent far too many days trying to obtain critical information about the project's code structure and database from the engineers who had developed it.

What is a software application?

When we think of a software application, most of us will conjure up the image of some sort of user interface splashed across a computer screen. As far as most of us are concerned, whatever is on the screen is the software. Period.

Engineers will tend to look at it a little differently. They are of course very aware of what goes on 'behind the screen' that makes all this stuff appear as it does and do all the things it does.

As a software artist who is focused on 'bridging the gap between end users and engineers' I have always found it necessary and worthwhile to explore the 'materials' that I work with. In doing so I can better control the emotional impact of an application on the user: the more I know about how the technology ticks, the more I can coax an application into being a pleasurable experience for a user.

As a software artist I am a beast with two heads. I am an artist by compulsion and I am a software designer/engineer both by choice and sheer determination to understand technology. Most people tend to address one head or the other, depending upon whether they meet me first as an artist or as an engineer. Some colleagues grasp the nature of my hybrid approach and they are a pleasure to work with. Some never grasp it at all.

A couple of weeks ago I alluded to my journey of discovery into server side web programming as being like an expedition over perilous, rocky terrain. Certainly the learning curve has been steep in places but I really enjoy the view from the top - when the answers to previously daunting questions can be finally seen with alleviating clarity.

Suddenly summer is over. Whoops! I forgot to go to the beach!

Time flies when you're growing a new business and this summer I chose to spend a lot of my time building a data driven web site from the ground up. I've done lots of desktop software development but I've never really gotten into web technology that deeply before. So of course that meant many long hours glued to my computer and reading lots of very thick technical books.

My friend Matt just returned from a trip to a beach of sorts. He and his wife hiked for three days along the rugged coast of the Bay of Fundy.