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Improving Drupal 8's usability and the impact

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We started regular Drupal usability meetings twice a week almost a year ago in March 2016. That is a long time and we succeeded in supporting many key initiatives in this time, including reviews on new media handling and library functionality, feedback on workflow user experience, outside-in editing and place block functionality. We helped set scope for the changes required to inline form errors on its way to stability. Those are all supporting existing teams working on their respective features where user interfaces are involved.

However, we also started to look at some Drupal components and whether we can gradually improve them. One of the biggest tasks we took on was redesigning the status page, where Drupal's system information is presented and errors and warnings are printed for site owners to resolve. While that looks like a huge monster issue, Roy Scholten in fact posted a breakdown of how the process itself went. If we were to start a fresh issue (which we should have), the process would be much easier to follow and would be more visible. The result is quite remarkable:

New status page in Drupal 8.3

While the new status page is amazing, for me the biggest outcome is how eager people were for this refresh and the example we set as to what is possible to do in Drupal 8. We can take a page, redesign it completely and get it released in a minor release for everyone to use! Some feedback on the result:

If this is not enough proof that we can make significant improvements and that people are more than open to receive them, not sure what else could be it.

To join these efforts, there are several smaller things in the works currently, including improving the bulk operations UI on views forms (or for the more adventurous redesigning filters and bulk operations, which would affect the content, users and even the media admin pages). We are working to update the throbber in the Seven theme, make the add content link finger friendly, and so on. There are many smaller to bigger issues for anyone to work on, we can match you with an issue. We need designers, developers, testers, etc.

Want to be a part of the next celebrated improvement? Join the UX slack on drupal.slack.com (get an invite at http://drupalslack.herokuapp.com/). Meetings are 9pm CEST every Tuesday and 9am CEST every Wednesday. See you there!

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web