I'd like to share a recent experience that seems relevant to your interests. I set up a Drupal instance and enabled some useful features such as a rich text editor, an integrated file manager, a block containing a list of the current user's recently modified pages (the workgroup module wasn't ready for Drupal 6 at the time), etc. for a group of librarians who were interested in implementing some of their ideas around structuring library research guides (this is in an academic library). I introduced Drupal's book functionality to them as one possible way of structuring the guides. After creating a couple of guides, one of the librarians reported that she felt Drupal wasn't as usable as another product that she had tried, Springshare's LibGuides (direct link to demo).
Her main criticism was that LibGuides allowed her to create a tabbed interface for users of her guides. I have to admit that LibGuides is slick, and that for content creators who want to provide a tabbed interface to their pages, the product does offer some very polished, easy-to-use tools. Looking around at the modules available for Drupal, I could not find any that made it possible to compete with LibGuide's ability to allow content creators to integrate tabs into their pages (although there are several modules that allow module developers to build tabbed interfaces).
Another feature of LibGuides' that is very nice is that it makes it very easy for content creators to add blocks to their pages. The librarians I was working with want to add guide-specific syndication feeds as blocks, as well as meebo and other IM-style widgets. Both of these tasks are possible in Drupal, but again, LibGuides makes it very easy to do so compared to Drupal. LibGuides allows content creators to drag and drop blocks, a feature limited to Drupal site admins.
I needed to remind myself that LibGuides is specialized whereas Drupal is generalized, and I still argue that as a general package Drupal is one of the most flexible content management frameworks you will encounter. However, first impressions are important and if potential library staff users feel that specialized products like LibGuides are a better choice than Drupal for the types of content that they create (and they very well might be within that limited context), it makes it difficult to convince them that Drupal is worth using as a general tool. I'd love to be able to develop a module that allows content creators to produce tabbed interfaces to Drupal books, for example, to compete with LibGuides at least in that respect. But to justify that development effort, I would first need to convince my users of the overall advantages that Drupal as a general CMF has over a commercial product. Small gains in usability would go a long way to making that argument easier.
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Recent usability experience
Hi Michael,
I'd like to share a recent experience that seems relevant to your interests. I set up a Drupal instance and enabled some useful features such as a rich text editor, an integrated file manager, a block containing a list of the current user's recently modified pages (the workgroup module wasn't ready for Drupal 6 at the time), etc. for a group of librarians who were interested in implementing some of their ideas around structuring library research guides (this is in an academic library). I introduced Drupal's book functionality to them as one possible way of structuring the guides. After creating a couple of guides, one of the librarians reported that she felt Drupal wasn't as usable as another product that she had tried, Springshare's LibGuides (direct link to demo).
Her main criticism was that LibGuides allowed her to create a tabbed interface for users of her guides. I have to admit that LibGuides is slick, and that for content creators who want to provide a tabbed interface to their pages, the product does offer some very polished, easy-to-use tools. Looking around at the modules available for Drupal, I could not find any that made it possible to compete with LibGuide's ability to allow content creators to integrate tabs into their pages (although there are several modules that allow module developers to build tabbed interfaces).
Another feature of LibGuides' that is very nice is that it makes it very easy for content creators to add blocks to their pages. The librarians I was working with want to add guide-specific syndication feeds as blocks, as well as meebo and other IM-style widgets. Both of these tasks are possible in Drupal, but again, LibGuides makes it very easy to do so compared to Drupal. LibGuides allows content creators to drag and drop blocks, a feature limited to Drupal site admins.
I needed to remind myself that LibGuides is specialized whereas Drupal is generalized, and I still argue that as a general package Drupal is one of the most flexible content management frameworks you will encounter. However, first impressions are important and if potential library staff users feel that specialized products like LibGuides are a better choice than Drupal for the types of content that they create (and they very well might be within that limited context), it makes it difficult to convince them that Drupal is worth using as a general tool. I'd love to be able to develop a module that allows content creators to produce tabbed interfaces to Drupal books, for example, to compete with LibGuides at least in that respect. But to justify that development effort, I would first need to convince my users of the overall advantages that Drupal as a general CMF has over a commercial product. Small gains in usability would go a long way to making that argument easier.