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Drupal Voices 50: Mark Boulton on Progress on Drupal 7 User Experience

Team Lullabot
September 24, 2009
  • Artist: Lullabot
  • Title: Drupal Voices 50: Mark Boulton on Progress on Drupal 7 User Experience
  • Album: Drupal Voices
  • Year: 2009
  • Length: 19:13 minutes (17.65 MB)
  • Format: Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

Mark Boulton gives a progress update on the Drupal 7 User Experience Project (aka #D7UX) and then talks about:

  • Tension between Open Source Developers and Designers within Drupal
  • Growing pains associated with serving a broader audience
  • Challenges of iterative design
  • Some of their Design Principles and User Experience Strategy
  • Next steps for fully implementing the D7UX during the code slush period
  • Reflections on working on a design project where the client is an entire community
  • And why he's grown more as a designer over the past year than any other professional year

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Comments

Good to hear Mark be so

On September 24th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) said:

Good to hear Mark be so candid about the problems they've been having and his frank attitude towards it.

Without wanting to step on too many toes, open source projects live and breathe on their commercial uptake for long term viability, and any steps that help ensure people like me can walk into big company boardrooms and pitch Drupal against a massive proprietary CMS (and win) gets the thumbs up.

Stick with it Mark - you guys have been doing a great job so far and it's a great leap forward for Drupal.

On developers and designers

On September 24th, 2009 Wim Mostrey (not verified) said:

Karoly Negyesi (chx) has a good post on this very subject by the way. It's good to get both a developer and a designer perspective on this issue.

Thanks!

On September 24th, 2009 kentbye said:

Thanks for the link, and definitely check out the discussion that we had on the DrupalCon Paris wrap-up podcast for a lot more developer perspectives and discussion on this issue since I think @webchick really disagrees with the sentiment that designs *can't* get involved and be agents of change.

The big issue is that there's a much, much higher barrier to entry for participation. In particular, this CVS application issue from a designer trying to contribute back a theme is probably a good metaphoric example (if not completely representative) for the type of third degree hoops that developers will put designers through to participate (via @jacine)