design

Drupal UX call, june 12 2018

Roy — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 21:04:54 +0000

Sub title

With live sketching!

Today about how to handle buttons you don’t want people to click, indicating global changes, pager behaviour and standards for UI texts.

Tags

Drupal

design

Doorscheuren en weggooien,

Roy — Mon, 14 May 2018 19:51:33 +0000

dat zijn de echte ontwerpbeslissingen.

Tags

design

process

A few links to get started with Drupal UX

Roy — Tue, 01 May 2018 12:13:09 +0000

Sub title

Links to find out where Drupal design work is happening

Join some Slack channels: see https://www.drupal.org/slack. First step: visit http://drupalslack.herokuapp.com to get an automatic invite.

Join some Slack channels:

#contribute
#ux
#admin-ui

Some admin ui related issues:

"usability" is the catch all for design, ux, etc. issues:
https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?issue_tags=usability

If you want to find general small fixes to work on, have a look at the issues tagged "novice":
https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?issue_tags=novice

The (somewhat outdated) UI standards documentation: http://drupal.org/ui-standards

Links to topics, and a calendar with topic specific meetings: http://yoroy.com/2017/drupal-core-meetings

Tags

design

Designer wanted for the new Drupal core demo

Roy — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 14:33:46 +0000

Sub title

Putting something in the box

/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/20170215-designer-wanted.png?itok=uyV_UZlx

A quick reminder that there are a few days left to apply as the designer for the new demo installation for Drupal 8.

Drupal wants to make a better impression fresh out of the box and for that, we need to put something nice in the box first. We now have the opportunity to experiment with sample content in a new “Demo” install profile. That’s why we are now looking for a designer to make that sample content look and feel good.

If you are a designer and want to have a big impact on the initial Drupal core user experience, have a look at the plan and consider joining this cool project.

Fair warning: getting design work done in Drupal has been notoriously hard, but this project is well scoped and has buy in from the product managers, so I do hope you (or the designer friend you will pass this link on to) will put your name in the hat. Thank you!

Tags

Drupal

drupalplanet

design

Designing delivery

Roy — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 21:51:54 +0000

Sub title

Clarify and make actionable. Repeat

I'm reading the book.
Always been fascinated by complexity and how to navigate it.
Noticing that as a designer, that's what I like to do. Clarify and make actionable.
Using design to make a strategy concrete, using design to iterate on shippable services.
Continuously.

Tags

design

process

How to make design in open source happen

Roy — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 22:36:48 +0000

Sub title

Two rough draft lists.

Designers that want to get involved in open source projects:

Don’t burst through the door and start yelling that you’re all doing it wrong. That might be true, but things were not made to suck on purpose.
Instead, ease in. Find out where the daily conversation happens. Join and start asking questions. “Why is this working like this?”
Usability tests are an ideal way to show which things need improvement.
Write a review of the software. Highlight what you think works well and what could be improved.
Have a user centred process. Stick to it. Show the work, take people along on the journey towards a solution.
Small teams get things done. Take in all the feedback, pick out the useful bits but stay true to your vision.
Have a vision.
Make sure you care. But not too much.

Open source projects that want to involve designers:

Not only code is gold.
Design is not the surface layer over a bunch of code. Allow people to dig in, have some patience with what may seem like silly questions.
Do you know who the software is for? And what those people want to achieve with it? The answers to these two questions are required foundations or effective design can not happen.
Ask for reviews from your users (or: which support questions keep popping up in your bug tracker?)
If every feature is important then nothing is important. Design is about making trade-offs, so prioritise. Making this thing easier to do will make those other things less obvious.
Interaction designers create the different paths through the software. Information architects organise and structure the necessary words, sentences and other content objects. User interface designers make things look consistent and create the right visual hierarchies. Usability specialists will show you what your users experience. What kind of design expertise would your project benefit from most?
Be prepared to write the code that implements somebody else’s ideas.

Yup, plotting my FOSDEM talk in the open :)

Tags

open source

design

fosdem2015

FOSDEM 2015 will have an open source design track

Roy — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 22:26:05 +0000

Sub title

Lets make better things.

On January 31 and February 1 the 15th edition of the FOSDEM event will be held in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is the largest gathering of open source community members in Europe. More than 5000 people will come from all parts of the world to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

As the name says, the event is highly developer centric, so the main focus has always been on the technology and the code. But open source software has graphical user interfaces too! Buttons to click, sliders to drag, forms to fill out, boxes to check, screens to swipe and what have you.

Useful software attracts users. To keep them around and attract more users, the useful has to be made usable. Which means uncovering and prioritising user goals and needs and doing the work to find out how to best serve those. That’s where design comes in.

This year FOSDEM will have it’s first ever “devroom” dedicated to the topic of open source design. User experience architects, interaction designers, information architects, usability specialists and designer/coder unicorns will share experiences and discuss the good and bad of design in open source environments.

Open source software is a driving force behind all things online. As more aspects of business, culture, society, humanity as a whole move into the digital domain it becomes just as more important to ensure that people don’t get left behind because of the sheer complexity of it all. There’s a lot that the craft of design can contribute to ensure this.

I’ll deliver a short talk about how we started, grew and maintain a user experience design team within the Drupal project. Otherwise, the schedule is looking great. I’m looking forward to meet my open source designer colleagues.

See you there?

Tags

design

fosdem

drupalplanet

A short list of Drupal 8 UX priorities

Roy — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 23:52:01 +0000

A short list of Drupal 8 UX priorities Roy 27-04-2011

(where Leisa has the long-form version)

Work the UX design process.

Help developers make better design decisions. More usability engineering. Grow the team.

See: pattern library, issue queue work in Prairie, Minnesota Lab testing, Acquia testing

Improve core site building tools

Help Jeremy build sites.

See: Core context UI, Modules page, menus, content types (Field UI)

Design content editor workflows

Connect the dots for Verity, so that she can get her new content out and manage existing stuff.

See: Workbench, Content editor group

Make the initial install a more focussed application

Connect some more dots: what does a base Drupal install do for you? Can we do 3 fun, core-only Apps?

See: Snowman, install profiles

Improve the social architecture for community collaboration

Make contributing more awesome for more people. Humanize community tools and processes.

See: Prairie initiative

Drupal

d8ux

design