Drupal UX team update, February 2012

Today we’ll have our 14th edition of UX open hours in IRC. It’s the best way to stay up to date on Drupal UX work and you’re all invited.

We started these bi-weekly meetings in July 2011 as a means for experienced contributors to check in on each others work. But more importantly, these chats are for anybody interested in contributing to a better Drupal UX to introduce themselves and find a good place to cut their teeth.

And it’s working. We’re steadily growing the team of people that help with research, usability testing, design and development.

Why then don’t you see much activity around UX issues?

Because we’re following a design process of Research > Design > Build. It should be no news that the issue queue is really only fit for that last ‘Build’ stage.

The work happens in Google docs and spreadsheets, shared Dropbox folders, Skype calls and IRC discussions with the occasional Skitch screenshot back-and-forth.

It’s not ideal to not have this process tracked somehow in the issue queue. We’re running the risk of hitting the issue queue with ‘final’ designs that seemingly come out of nowhere, which is counter-productive in getting people excited to help with implementation.

Join us today

So, if you want to keep up to date on the redesign of the modules page and the content creation page, where we are with the analysis of the Google usability test findings or how we think we can improve the core account signup process and learn how you can join the fun, come join us today in IRC.

If you can’t make it, we post notes of previous meetings

I’ll see you there.