I've heard all 56 podcasts and I love them. You guys are the best. Thanx a lot!
B.

Angie - great summary!

A couple of follow-up observations from that-guy-who-set-this-up....

First, yes, testing *is* really just about finding out what is wrong. In a perfect world, you wouldn't need usability testing at all - just like you wouldn't need unit testing if you wrote flawless code all day long ;). But because most of us are mortal, we need good methodologies for finding out where things went wrong, be it in our code or in our UI.

Angie's point about taking it to the community is well-taken. Open source presents a variety of unique challenges for usability testing. We at the University of Minnesota Libraries, for example, have worked and are working with partners outside of the University environment. But in these cases, we have a corporate design team and product managers directly involved in the process. Decisions are made and responsibilities are assigned during the wrap-up to any give round of testing.

It's a little more complicated in a massively distributed community like Drupal where decision-making is largely a shared enterprise. Who gets to "own" User Experience for Drupal, particularly in cases where tasks cross multiple modules, possibly multiple templates? I think Angie's answer is where I eventually came down: it's everyone's. It's about promoting user-centered design in the Drupal community and educating folks about usability issues where can identify them.

I personally am not a usability expert, far from it. So, by "Drupal community," we mean "us too" - we're embarking upon major implementation this fall and felt like we really to see things through the eyes of new users in order to set design priorities. Fortunately, we have resident usability professionals at the University who do this full time (the testing wasn't just developers + equipment). We now have a much better sense for where the pain points are going to be, where we need to develop better documentation and what we need to just flat-out hide from our users. And because we took this process to the community, some of these problems are being solved right now as I post this comment.

Finally, I can't tell you how gratifying it has been to see U of M popping up in usability-related issues cues and to see the kind of conversation that the testing process has helped to nurture along. We at the Libraries were incredibly impressed with the dedication, competence and all-around good nature of Dries and the rest of the Drupal team. With such talented leadership, I'm optimistic about solving usability issues as they arise.

Cheers,
-Chad

P.S. Love the podcast.

Hey, thanks for mentioning the site! I just wanted to clarify that the site is community powered, Drupal users submit reviews, they're not scraped from anywhere. :)

Is it just me, or does everyone seem to be getting ahead of themselves with Drupal 7?

Views and CCK are STILL not done for Drupal 6 yet, which many would argue, make the Drupal 6 release largely incomplete.

Poor Earl is stuck struggling with getting help on Views:
http://www.angrydonuts.com/where-are-they

...and everyone has moved on to Drupal 7.

Would other people not agree that we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit here?

BTW - thanks again guys for the great podcast as always. It just would have been nice to put some attention on Views/CCK as this is a serious concern (they are months behind and slowing many other Drupal modules down).

very nice blog, one of the best i have read so far, found the ifo to be useful to a newbe like my self! thanks
barry