Thanks for your very informative post Devin. The book club is a great site and well themed for the audience. It’s interesting to read about the very specific roles that have emerged around this well targeted application.
It’s also interesting to see the same usability issues showing up around the administration tasks. In particular the ‘all or nothing’ phenomenon where users who need certain content admin rights are forced into the Drupal admin ‘minefield’ as you aptly put it. In addition to user stress, I’m hearing that this is also causing a blurring of roles as site administrators are asked to do some of the content admin minefield work.
I liked your summary ‘flexible architecture but inflexible interface’ which captures the Drupal situation very succinctly. As I read these and other posts, and from my own experience, it appears that the entire dimension of user interface construction is largely missing from the Drupal paradigm. Yes, certainly there are ways to create UI’s but they all start from the inside and work outwards. In all my usability experience, I have done the interface design starting from the outside and working in. In other words, we’d draw up what we want to see, build the interface as we envisioned it and then hook it up to the back end. This ‘blank slate’ approach is natural to the design world but effectively impossible in the Drupal context.
There’s an intriguing problem lurking here: aside from the entire question of Role definition and Role based UI design, even if you did have an idea about what the user interface should look like for content administrators, how would you ever get it? It’s an obvious question perhaps - especially for anyone who has been working with Drupal for a while - but I think it’s worth asking anyway.
The answer is presumably in the creation of ‘UI bridging’ modules that can offer alternative (better) ways to work with content and perhaps even the database in general. You mentioned the ‘Moder8’ module and I gather that you would consider this to be a ‘UI bridge’?
I’m curious to know if there are other such modules that anyone has come across that have been useful. I know Panels is out there but I will add that ironically I've not managed to get though its interface succesfully (although to be fair I think in retrospect I may have run into IE bugs). Instead I chose to use Views and coding techniques directly.
Has anyone else had experience these or other modules?
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Missing the User Interface design dimension?
Thanks for your very informative post Devin. The book club is a great site and well themed for the audience. It’s interesting to read about the very specific roles that have emerged around this well targeted application.
It’s also interesting to see the same usability issues showing up around the administration tasks. In particular the ‘all or nothing’ phenomenon where users who need certain content admin rights are forced into the Drupal admin ‘minefield’ as you aptly put it. In addition to user stress, I’m hearing that this is also causing a blurring of roles as site administrators are asked to do some of the content admin minefield work.
I liked your summary ‘flexible architecture but inflexible interface’ which captures the Drupal situation very succinctly. As I read these and other posts, and from my own experience, it appears that the entire dimension of user interface construction is largely missing from the Drupal paradigm. Yes, certainly there are ways to create UI’s but they all start from the inside and work outwards. In all my usability experience, I have done the interface design starting from the outside and working in. In other words, we’d draw up what we want to see, build the interface as we envisioned it and then hook it up to the back end. This ‘blank slate’ approach is natural to the design world but effectively impossible in the Drupal context.
There’s an intriguing problem lurking here: aside from the entire question of Role definition and Role based UI design, even if you did have an idea about what the user interface should look like for content administrators, how would you ever get it? It’s an obvious question perhaps - especially for anyone who has been working with Drupal for a while - but I think it’s worth asking anyway.
The answer is presumably in the creation of ‘UI bridging’ modules that can offer alternative (better) ways to work with content and perhaps even the database in general. You mentioned the ‘Moder8’ module and I gather that you would consider this to be a ‘UI bridge’?
I’m curious to know if there are other such modules that anyone has come across that have been useful. I know Panels is out there but I will add that ironically I've not managed to get though its interface succesfully (although to be fair I think in retrospect I may have run into IE bugs). Instead I chose to use Views and coding techniques directly.
Has anyone else had experience these or other modules?
Michael
Michael Baynger
www.TheUserAdvocateGroup.com