Breaking the silence – what we’ve been up to!

Posted: May 13th, 2009 | Author: Leisa Reichelt | Filed under: Process | 7 Comments »

Here’s a rough transcript of the video content, if you read this you won’t miss out on any content covered in the video:

It’s been a little while since our last ‘update’ so we wanted to check in and let you know what we’ve been up to on the project in the past couple of weeks.

We’ve been moving through a transition in the project from the high level, strategic ‘iteration zero’ (in Agile terms) phase of the project to a much more detailed, tactical, concrete phase. Until now there’s been lots of thinking and communicating ideas, now we’re moving into a phase where we need to get our heads down and plough through a lot of detailed work, and we’re finding it harder to get the time to give updates. Part of the way to address this was the creation of the Project Framework and there have been lots of little discussions going on in those threads, but we do need to find a better way to communicate regularly these more granular pieces of work – stay tuned as we figure out the best way to do that (and we welcome suggestions of course!)

Mark describes this phase with a diagram (of course), that show the communication decreasing as the fidelity increases (and us at the cross roads) – it’s not something we’re happy with, so we’re working on it.
Fidelity Vs Communication

There has been work a-plenty though, starting with a great workshop we had over two days in London in late April – Jeff Noyes and Jason Reed (the Acquia designers), Roy Scholten (yoroy) and Dries gather round a table with Mark & I to work on the D7UX design work and see if we could break it. Jeff has a great write up of the workshop here and I managed to grab a tiny bit of video for you (of course!)

Since then, I’ve been working on defining the interfaces and interactions in some wireframes and Mark has been working up the visual language, and we’ve started working with the engineering team at Acquia to start getting this built. We hope to have something that you can touch and feel in the not too distant future (how exciting!) This is just the beginning of the journey and we still have a lot of refinement to do, and the whole system will continue to evolve as we work through more challenges and learn more and more.

In the wireframes we’re identifying a whole stack of ‘needs attention’ issues – these are things like ‘the WYSIWIG menu needs special UX attention’, ‘the idea of a media library needs special UX attention’ – they are kind of smallish chucks and fairly modular and we’re hoping that we might be able to throw these out into the community and ask for your help to take the lead in working through the details of these kinds of challenges. We’re not sure of the best way to engage/manage this – your thoughts and guidance would be appreciated (issue list seems the logical place, but is it?)

In the next couple of weeks we’re going to get back to focusing on usability testing and user research in a much more regular way. We’ve kind of dropped the ball on Crowd Sourced Usability Testing in the past few weeks (and in retrospect our schedule was pretty aggressive) but once we have a working prototype it will be much, much easier for us (and you) to be much more active in continuing to test and gain insight into what is working and what needs refinement in the interface and overall User Experience (UX). (by the way, did you see that Wordpress have just opened up usability testing to their community as well? interesting huh?)

Finally, we’ve started working with an awesome authoring tools accessibility expert Ann McMeekin, to help ensure that we’re making Drupal7 an amazing user experience for *everyone* – especially given some of the more ‘fancy’ interactions that we’ve been proposing – there’s a new section of the Framework for Accessibility and I’m pleased to report that Ann is pretty happy with the approach we’ve taken so far and working with us to help take advantage of some of the newer interface options available to us thanks to ajax and JavaScript without negatively impacting the UX for those of us with special needs.

So, that’s about it for now. Expect plenty more from us in the coming weeks. And, as ever, let us know what you’re thinking and don’t forget to keep track of what you’re most interested in through the comments and content in the Project Framework.