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Drupal Voices 50: Mark Boulton on Progress on Drupal 7 User Experience
Listen online:
- DrupalVoices050.mp3
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
For more information:
- D7UX blog
- Mark's post on Design in Open Source
- Earl Miles: An observation about Designers versus Developers
- Bojhan Somers' Reflections on a D7UX Project
- UPDATE: chx on the communication failures through D7UX
- Larry Garfield's proposal for a Human Interface Guidelines document
September 24, 2009 - 4:17am
19:13 minutes (17.65 MB)
stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)
Comments
Good to hear Mark be so
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
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!
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)