Drupal is a fun community.

The messages from Drupal.org totally sound like they are the defaults from a Core install or designed by committee.

Can we add some personality into the text? Can we make Drupal sound fun? Can the default personality expressed by messages in drupal.org have humour and warmth?

Many successful platforms like Flickr do this.

I'd like to have a "Voice" for drupal.org. It should aim to be consistent and clear, but why not make it at least interesting? We can't have our text sound like it comes from a machine if we want people to feel involved in the community.

If we were going to define a story & choose a mentor we could do even more to add that personality http://winningthestorywars.com/

Things we could improve:

  • 404 Pages (maybe a trek reference as opposed to starwars)
  • Maintenance Upgrades
  • Unplanned Downtime (fail whale or angry pink unicorn anyone?)
  • Welcoming messages (Emails when signing up)
  • The home page (it is pretty boring)
  • A login message to thank you for logging in
  • A message when you contribute a patch
  • Error messages when there are problems with submitted forms
  • Occasiional easter eggs or goofy things tied to season or say PI day.
  • All of the landing pages (they are all so bland and boring.
  • Top level handbook pages
  • Search, if we can't give them what they are looking for maybe we can make folks laugh

Please add to the list above!

Comments

mgifford’s picture

We can do better than this in our welcome messages:

[user:name],

A request to reset the password for your account has been made at [site:name].

You may now log in to [site:url-brief] by clicking on this link or copying and pasting it in your browser:

[user:one-time-login-url]

This is a one-time login, so it can be used only once. It expires after one day and nothing will happen if it's not used.

After logging in, you will be redirected to [user:edit-url] so you can change your password.

Attention: The username on [site:name] is case sensitive.

How about:

Hey [user:name],

Did you request that your password be reset on [site:name]?

We can help you reset your password to [site:url-brief] by clicking on this link or copying and pasting it in your browser:

[user:one-time-login-url]

This is a one-time login, so it can be used only once. You've got 24hrs to use it and if you don't get to it nothing will happen.

After clicking on that link you will be redirected to [user:edit-url] so that you can update your password. As Bruce Schneier says, "Pretty much anything that can be remembered can be cracked." - so make sure to make to make sufficiently secure.

Attention: The username on [site:name] is case sensitive.

mgifford’s picture

Issue tags: +maintain

Would love to see a 404 Error page contest spin out. No reason it couldn't change yearly. We really have to have something that's more entertaining than what we have now.

Often the Drupal.org tone is somewhere between generic and condesending. That's just not good!

This isn't something that can be done by committee. We need to designate it to someone to take care of. If there are problems, we can fix them.

LewisNyman’s picture

The best example of this that I've seen documented is Mailchimp. They have such a strong idea of their brand, do we?

LewisNyman’s picture

Actually, more important than that, they understand the emotions of users during each communication. They understand when to be fun and when to be serious. When to be playful and when to get to the point.

mgifford’s picture

Agreed. They are excellent at that. I don't know if you've read Designing for Emotion (I've just bought it), but definitely it's hitting those points.

So how do we bring this to d.o?

davidhernandez’s picture

I agree you can't do this by committee. The messages need to have a consistent voice, with a lasting identity. Should someone from the DA's marketing side be responsible?

coderintherye’s picture

+1. Love it.

Is it easy enough now for non-technical users to work on adding these text changes or would we want to create some central place to go that makes it easy for documentation-minded folks to put their suggested text changes in?

Who is the decider ultimately here for these kind of text changes? I haven't been involved in text changes lately, but I recall it being difficult to get a consensus formed and a change pushed in the past.

LewisNyman’s picture

Issue tags: +Usability

Tagging for UX review

rootwork’s picture

Big +1 from me on this.

davidhernandez’s picture

I talked to Holly about this. Compile a list of what we want rewritten and I will send it to her. She will have the DA staff writers rewrite them with our direction/feedback.

mgifford’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Thanks @davidhernandez - I'll start adding some in the summary and hope that folks expand on that.

davidhernandez’s picture

Lets keep the list to something a little more achievable for now. The home page, for example, is not going to be changed. It is on the radar of the Content Working Group, and will be part of the redesign they will be working on. It is a much more strategic change. Things like welcome messages, the 404, system messages, etc, should be completely doable.

Jsaylor’s picture

I talked with Holly and I will be working with my team to make this happen. Our content writer Leigh Carver is fantastic and this is right up her alley.

This is actually good timing because the Content Working Group is conducting in-depth research into Drupal.org users as part of the redesign process mentioned by @davidhernandez. We can use this research to inform the messages. Regardless what the research shows, "fun" is a common denominator I think we can all agree on because it is such an obvious value the community shares. I will look to have the messaging done and deployed early next month.

As part of the process I will initiate a review from the Content Working Group because the messaging is a component of Drupal.org content. Thanks all and let me know if you have questions or comments.

Joe Saylor
Membership and Marcomm Manager
Drupal Association

mgifford’s picture

Amazing! Thanks Joe.

mgifford’s picture

Jsaylor’s picture

Hi Mike, this has taken much longer than anticipated but it's now in the Drupal.org engineering team's work queue to deploy. The team has a lot of priorities, but I will keep this thread posted on progress. -Joe

mgifford’s picture

Thanks for the update!

YesCT’s picture

Jsaylor’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (fixed)
Issue tags: +d.o content strategy

We've done some work to make the site more friendly. The work on improving the "personality" of the site will continue with the Drupal.org content strategy project currently underway. I'm going to mark this close-fixed. -Joe