I've spent a bit of time looking at the CCK UI for D7 and it has some real pain points. For starters, all content types have custom fields, yet upon submitting the basics (title and publishing options), we send users back to the listing of content types vs. port them into fields. I could go on, and gladly will if you call me out on it. For now, I want to focus on how I've tried to make it better. It's lofty, and probably still needs some tweaks, but I think it's a huge improvement.

To begin, I went about tackling this UI with some guiding principles in mind:

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Smashing magazine recently published an article titled "10 useful usability findings & guidelines." There's a lot of good information here for both core committers and themers.

Of the findings, I found myself disagreeing with only one - "Most users do not scroll." In my testing, I've found the opposite - so long as false bottoms are not present. To avoid false bottoms, make sure content or design elements run past the bottom of your browser. See illustration below.

I wanted to thank everyone who signed up for Drupal Gardens usability testing. I received a lot of requests - unfortunatly I won't be able to accept all of them.

Usability testing focuses on a subset of tasks and requires only 6-10 users to identify problems. Any number greater than 10 merely reveals the same problems over and over again. Thankfully, D7 and Drupal Gardens are both feature rich, so there will be many more tests in the very near future.

Thanks so much,
Jeff Noyes

I received a lot of requests (thank you), but only a few provided email addresses. Trying to aggregate a list and communicate with everyone proved to be a chore. If you're interested in becoming a usability tester, please sign up here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFBqdHBlU19wcXhJVm9Xdzh.....

As I'm writing this entry, my colleague Barry Jaspan is over my shoulder getting frustrated while attempting to adjust his desk at our new office space. He's using a cleverly designed screwdriver designed to bend at 90 degrees and manipulate screws in hard to reach areas. While the idea of an adjustable, bendable screwdriver sounds like a good idea, based on observing Barry and a few others, I'm certain the inventor failed to observe people trying to use it.

Jason, Dries and I recently returned from a D7UX brainstorming session in London with Mark Boulton, Leisa Reichelt and Roy Scholten.  The goal of our meeting was to further outline known issues, further progress on the d7UX designs, and leverage the combined Drupal knowledge of Roy, Dries and myself to poke holes in the existing design concepts posted on d7ux.org.  We covered a lot of ground, from installing modules, managing users, adding editing and finding content, real-time editing and even covered a bit of themeing.  It was a mind-melting two days, but we made a lot of progress.

Leisa and Mark recently blogged about crowd-sourcing usability testing. I'm really interested in this topic, in fact i spoke about it in DC. For those of you not familiar with the concept, the idea is to generate vast amounts of usage data. Consider the fact that Drupal has been tested 3 times, roughly once per year, generating approximately 24 videos of users attempting to fulfill a fraction of the tasks in Drupal core.

For the past month or so, Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been getting up to speed on Drupal and brainstorming ideas for improvement. They're now at a point where they need help from the community. They can not succeed without our participation, and thus far they're not getting the level of participation they need. At present, they immediate feedback on the following:

This is the second half of a screencast series on Acquia Search. In the first screencast, I demonstrated how to enable the appropriate modules. In this screencast, I show you how to configure and use Acquia Search and Apache Solr.

Learn how to get up and running with Acquia Search and Solr.