In late February I and a handful of other Drupal contributors will be headed towards Drupalcon a week early to do formal Usability Testing of Drupal at the University of Baltimore to help continue the research done by Becca Scollan and other graduate students there last year. We'll be doing 3 days of testing, followed by 3 more compiling the data and turning them into actionable items in the Drupal.org issue queues. Finally, we'll be presenting an overview of the issues we found at Drupalcon.
If you'd like to get involved there's a lot to get done between now and then. Specifically, the UX Team is working towards finding solutions to the following issues:
- Text links for 'Select all/None/Invert'
- Allow more users to see the node admin pages
- Help System - Patch #1
- Vertical Tabs
- Text format widgets
- And anything else tagged as a usability issue on Drupal.org.
Drupal 7 core maintainer Angela 'webchick' Byron has been nice enough to promise a focus of her review/commit time on usability issues this next month as we prepare for testing, so now's the time to focus on these issues.
We'll also be using this month to create and refine our test plan. A current working version of that document has been posted to the Usability group on https://groups.drupal.org. It's already starting to solicit some feedback, but we'd love to get as many eyes on it as possible.And finally, if contributing isn't your forte, but you'd still like to know how you can help out, we're trying to raise sponsorship money to help fund the testing. Everyone attending the testing is volunteering their time, but we will have travel expenses as well as the need to put together a budget to pay test subjects for their time. If you're willing to help out financially you can do so using the ChipIn widget to the right.