As mentioned in Dries' post, it would be very beneficial to have a separate "Usability" category for modules that intend to improve the usability of Drupal.

We have a lot of such modules in contrib. A very good starting point for Mark Boulton Design/Usability team would thus be to check existing approaches for stunning ideas (and possibly implementations).

Comments

boombatower’s picture

+1

I'll add UTS if this goes through.
http://drupal.org/project/uts

webchick’s picture

janusman’s picture

Also these. Which, BTW might want to merge into a single module:

http://drupal.org/project/userfly
http://drupal.org/project/vitzo_userfly

webchick’s picture

Title: Add "Usability" category for modules » Add "Administrative Interface" category for modules

Actually, after discussing this at length in #drupal today, "Usability" is probably not the best... our intent is to specifically identify modules that change the user interface in some way.

I threw out "User Interface Enhancers" but even that isn't perfect. Is Admin Menu "enhancing" the UI? Not really. It's offering people a more useful way to perform administrative functions. And something that does node edit on double-click of the title definitely doesn't qualify.

Joomla seems to call this class of modules "Admin Interface" which sun and I agreed covers 99% of the use cases. Since we don't abbreviate words, let's shoot for that one.

Anyone opposed?

dww’s picture

What about things like starbow's popup stuff, which isn't just for admins, but for, e.g. making the confirm form when you delete something appear inline without a whole new page load? I guess you could consider that "administrative", so maybe it's not the best counter example, but you get the idea. Or, how about modules that attach to the node add form, and if you're about to fill out a node reference field, you can open a popup to create your new other node, then immediately reference that in the original node you're creating? That's usability, but it's not "administrative" at all (unless you consider adding content "administrative", in which case the term is so broad as to be meaningless).

Of course, the d.o redesign calls for both "categories" and "tags" on projects, so we could always have a "usability" tag we could apply to anything related, but have a specific category for modules designed to enhance the administrative interface as proposed here. But, this doesn't seem like a completely obvious case where "Administrative Interface" makes the most sense.

p.s. I'll be the first to admin I'm not 100% clear on the division between categories and tags for projects in cases like this, either. ;)

sun’s picture

"Administrative Interface" should cover most cases. The given example of confirm forms mostly affects administrators or site moderators as well. (I'd say that most regular users did not ever see a confirm form.) In the discussion we came to the conclusion that it is mostly the administrative functionality in Drupal core that badly needs to be more usable.

Since MBD are starting with their work soon, it would be great to get this category as soon as possible.

My next best question would then be, whether we can send out an announcement on the mailing lists (yes, we can), but also add some of the modules on behalf of the maintainers into that category (in an IRC sprint?).

silverwing’s picture

Can I assume that the "Administration" category http://drupal.org/project/modules/?filters=type%3Aproject_project%20tid%... is what this issue is about and can be marked as fixed?

tvn’s picture

Status: Active » Fixed

Closed since no replies after #7.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.