Making comment form more usable

yes that would be better

And here's a patch.

Not sure if this can still go in as it's changing the database column name + comment object. If needs be, I can keep homepage except for the UI text.

Trying again -- with a patch made from the root directory now.

The patch above failed because (as kyle_mathews suggested) the homepage field was changed to webpage. I've rerolled with only changing the display of Homepage to Web site (as originally requested).

I actually think this change is neutral at best. Its rather odd for an app to ask me to name a 'web site' while leaving a comment. A homepage is a bit clearer, since it restricts the universe of web sites a lot.

Lol. I was just going to suggest we need to use website instead of web site.

IMO, the field "wants" the author's home page on the web, if he has one. That is, a page which tells me more about the author. A page equivalent to the profile page which drupal serves for authenticated users. In what way does "web site" communicate this? Do you think that the field "wants" something else?

Changing spelling of homepage makes sense but thats not what the current patch does.

If you look at sites/blogs with comments on, you'll see 'website' (one word) used most of the times.

But here's an issue that exposes a much bigger problem with this field: #796236: Change cryptic error message for wrong homepage URL to something easier to understand

As I said in #796236: Change cryptic error message for wrong homepage URL to something easier to understand, we recently run a simple Drupal based blog under some usability tests. The message of #796236 pretty confused our users.

Also the Homepage field label really confused our users. This is probably due to the fact that the tested website was in Italian so maybe Homepage isn't really a known word.

Users were also confused by the word Subject. Somehow they were confused by it.. probably the "standardized" email naming convention isn't that known or users doesn't associate a Subject of a comment on a website to the Subject of an email. The analogy simply didn't worked for our users.

Some of them were also confused by the "Save" button text. They associated it to something like Save as Draft or Save for later.

To fix this issues we ended up rewriting comment form with the following (translated from Italian to English):

function fabio_helper_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id) {
  switch ($form_id) {
    case 'comment_form':
        $form['homepage']['#title'] = t('Your personal website');
        $form['homepage']['#description'] = t('If you own a personal website insert its address in the form <em>http://www.example.com/</em> .');
        $form['subject']['#title'] = t('Comment Title');
        $form['submit']['#value'] = t('Send');
      break;
  }
}

Subsequent tests didn't show any problem with the above modifications.

Again, as we tested a localized Italian drupal version our findings might be misleading.. anyway I'm pretty sure that those finding could easily apply to English and other languages as well.

EDIT: the tested website was D6, so maybe the above function won't work on D7.

Wrote a blog post on our findings at http://www.varesano.net/blog/fabio/usability%20testing%20drupals%20comme...

Supposing we want to do some ground work here (like for example the patch in #10), why not simply migrate this to a field and be done with it?

Website (if any) should make it easier. Few people has a website, especially if you discard Facebook profiles.

I'm happy to make changes to the labels of fields and buttons, and to improve error messages, but changing 'Homepage' to 'Website' doesn't seem to address the problems identified by @fax8.

I'm not sure that 'Your personal website' is a good alternative since some people might want to enter their company's url.

Implemented the changes discussed on my blog post in the attached patch to current D7.

As wmostrey pointed out, 'Your personal website' is pretty restrictive so I used 'Your website'.

I also added a simple logic to display 'Save' if we are editing the comment or Submit if we are creating a new comment.

What do you think about this?

I'm not a big fan of the extra help text. It sort of 'pollutes' the form.

Me neither. Unfortunately, as the URLs have to be inserted in a specific form (http://www.example.com/) we thought that having the user reading some insertion instructions was better that have him inserting only www.example.com and then giving the wrong URL error. Any other suggestion?

Btw.. I'm not experienced with the testing results above.. What should I do to make them passes?

Is there any interest in this? I could recreate a patch without the extra help text as Dries commented in #22 .. I just wonder if anyone cares about this issue?

Our tests showed some serious usability issues with the comment form and I really would like to do something for it before D7 goes out.

Wow! 398 fails for that small patch...

The test bot is searching for fields on the comment form by their title, for example...

$this->assertFieldByName('op', t('Save'), t('Save button found.'));

...searches for the button with the title of "Save".

You can change the title that the test looks for, but I would suggest choosing one title, "Submit" or "Save", so that complicated revisions don't have to be made to the test file. Even if you are editing a comment, you are still submitting the form, so how about "Submit"?

Changing field names in the test file might not be the only problem, but it'd be a good place to start if you want the patch to pass.

#20: comment-form-usability.patch queued for re-testing.

Are we going to pick up this issue for Drupal 8 or are we going to close it?

Requested a retest of #7. I think that piece is a Drupal 7-only fix, because as far as I can tell there isn't a default Homepage field for comments anymore in Drupal 8 (someone correct me if I'm wrong). The biggest usability problem here is the required http://, and there's a Drupal 8 issue for that at #1473220: Allow users to omit the http:// prefix in URL form input elements.