Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.Help the Drupal UX team review the user interfaces of popular contributed modules.
Drupal 7 has seen much attention devoted to improving the user experience by introducing new interaction patterns, improved copy writing in the user interface and a reworked information architecture for administrative pages.
Much of the succes of this new strategy for the Drupal UX depends on contributed modules following the patterns laid out by the Drupal core. To help both module maintainers and UX team with this we ask you to document and review the current state of ui for 10 (5?) popular modules. UX team members aren't necessarily good with installing Drupal and modules locally. Module maintainers might not be experts in user interface design. You'll help discussion and collaboration among both by making these things visible and actionable.
## Tasks:
- Install the latest version of Drupal 7. Get familiar with the admin interface in particular. We'll help you set this up if needed, but it will preferably be on your own machine.
- Pick 10 modules from the 100 most installed contributed modules.
- For each module: install it and make screenshots of where they add or alter things in the administrative interface.
- Review each UI for consistency with core patterns copy writing and position within the information architecture: look out for longer-than-necessary form labels and descriptions, custom 'fancy' interface elements. Provide suggestions for improvements (no need to directly write a patch)
- Post screenshots and your review to the module's issue queue. Put a link to the issue in a wiki page on g.d.o/usability so we can find it
- Find UX team and ask for reviews on your report.
- (Totally optional: if you can, write a patch that implements the actual improvements.)
## What you'll learn:
- Install Drupal and modules
- Learn about the design strategies that underly the Drupal 7 user experience
- Learn to review user interfaces based on given guidelines. Heuristic evaluations, they're called in some circles.
## Resources
- Incomplete Drupal interaction design pattern library pages
- Handbook on user interface copy writing…
- Selected issues around the IA reorganisation
Primary contact: Roy Scholten
Comments
Comment #1
yoroy commented- Might want to narrow down the list of modules to choose from
- Need to look up actual links for the resources
- Thoughts?
Comment #2
vosechu commentedPersonally I think this is a great idea. I would love to see more links for the resources and I think you're spot on about winnowing down the list of modules. Also, I love the "What you'll learn" section. There's another bit in the GCI queue about the MBD guide, I don't know enough about the field but is this related to that issue as well? #947638: Convert MBD Visual Language style guide to docs nodes on d.o.
Comment #3
Bojhan commentedA few thoughts, since this is a student likely new in the field of UX as much as Drupal - we need to have more focused questions rather than does it conflict with standing rules? For example, is it in the right IA category see documentation X, Is the copy writing actionable and omit needless words?
I would say, since this is kind of a week worth (in the evenings) assignment we wind it down to say 3/5 modules to review. And also why not more random modules, the top ones have known or more identified issues? Also will help the student outline more broad issues (which probably don't overlap that much between token ui and views ui, par example)
Comment #4
dawehnerAdding the reusable task tag.