Are we there yet?

Knee-deep in the Drupal.org redesign project with Mark Boulton Design, I thought it might be helpful to take a look at what we’ve done, what remains and what it all means.

One of the goals of this project is to invite and engage new users, so there has been considerable effort to understand how those “outsiders” use Drupal.org and how we can improve that experience. Drupal.org will naturally continue to be a place that facilitates and supports the existing community, but we can, must and will do a better job for those new folks, too.

As a community, we collaborate on Drupal to make it easy for people to share content and to create engaged and empowered users. It would have been disingenuous (not to mention a complete disaster) to approach this project in any way other than an open, collaborative and iterative manner. At every step, the design team has structured the process to involve the community in a meaningful and substantial way.

The prospect of having 300,000 clients may seem risky and intimidating, but Mark Boulton Design and Leisa Reichelt have risen to the challenge undaunted. Mark and Leisa call the approach that we’ve taken to this project “design by community”.

Design by community means that those of us who are involved with the redesign effort have been blogging in real time about issues we’re thinking about, sharing work in progress for feedback, and leveraging existing tools to harness broad-based participation on usability, information architecture, even branding.  We then look and listen for themes to emerge. With the scale of the participation, it would be impossible to respond to everyone individually, but it is possible to respond to in aggregate both in posts and, more importantly, the subsequent iteration. We’re able to do this because of our emphasis on rapid, iterative and open prototyping.

It’s working and it’s getting a lot of attention.

On that point, I need to digress a moment to talk about Wordpress and their redesign. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the team working on the new version of Wordpress must love Drupal. In September, Wordpress issued two user surveys: the first about navigation options and labels and the second about where to put some interface elements and labels.

Surveys are a tool that all of us have used, but we chose not to rely on them for this project because we believe they’re a poor substitute for actual user research and/or usability testing. Asking users to respond and pick their own solution is of limited value and doesn’t leverage the full potential of crowdsourcing.

Throughout our d.o redesign process, there has been genuine conversation in real time about what we were thinking about and how you could help:

• The Drupal.org Redesign Group on groups.drupal.org has been our primary home and these imminent consequences of a new design has spawned related discussion in the Infrastructure Redesign Group
• Mark Boulton Design - for updates on the branding process
• Leisa's Blog Disambiguity - for updates on user research and information architecture
• Mark Boulton’s Personal Blog - for overall thoughts and observations on the process
• Other folks have chimed in with their thoughts through Drupal Planet

If you’re just starting to tune in now, you will have a lot of reading ahead of you. For folks looking for a quick summary, here’s what we’ve done to date:

• Participant recruitment. There was never any question that we’d be able to find Drupal users who were excited about and willing to participate in this project, but since we weren’t just doing this for ourselves, there needed to be an outreach component, too. After Drupalcon Szeged, a Google Apps form was created soliciting users to participate. It was publicized on several sites including Drupal.org and garnered more than 1000 respondents. Leisa has also been stalking folks in Twitter with the keyword Drupal.
• User interviews. Leisa and Mark conducted some interviews in Szeged and Leisa followed up with folks in an attempt to understand how they used Drupal.org and some of the challenges they faced. These interviews lead to the “insider” and “outsider” construct that has  helped frame who out users are and what they need from Drupal.org
• Experience strategy. The experience strategy document rightfully has become the touchstone for the entire project. It outlines, simply and directly, what our mission and values are as a community for Drupal.org. Every decision has been and will continue to be made with regard to how it can help us realize our desired experience for users on d.o.
• Branding. Assuring folks that no harm would come to our beloved little blue Druplicon, Mark embarked on an exploration of Drupal's values and how they might be incorporated into an initial revised wordmark. Incorporating the feedback we received, there was one round of refinement released before the focus shifted to the prototype. (The branding will be finalized along with the design concept -- more work is still to be done.)
• Crowdsourced wireframes. Leisa invited folks to share their wireframe thoughts via Flickr. Here’s what we learned.
• Online card sort. Using Optimal Sort, participants were asked to self-identify as either Drupal insiders or outsiders.  163 experienced Drupal users (insiders) and 72 new user (outsiders). Here’s what we learned.
• Information architecture. The card sort led to an initial draft of a revised IA, which was expanded further before leading to the prototypes.
• Open prototyping. We’re now in prototyping. The current version is Iteration 5, which also features some initial visual design reintroducing the wordmark, now in context.
• Usability testing on prototypes. Leisa is conducting some formal testing in person, but we’re also inviting others to hold their own tests. A wiki (yes, I know it isn’t in Drupal, move on) has been set up as a support and best practices resource covering topics including how to get set up, how to run a good interview, and recruiting as well as how to understand what you learned and how to share those lessons with others. Leisa has already conducted usability tests in Berlin (where she gave a keynote presentation about the Redesign at the Web 2.0 Expo) and has another one upcoming in London on November 3. Please contact her through her blog if you’re in or around London and are interested.

The process is taking a bit longer than we anticipated so expect to see a few schedule updates on g.d.o from me in the next couple of days. The primary reason? YOU! The participation from the community has been thoughtful, engaged and massive. We simply didn’t anticipate that it would be at this scale (thank you!!!) and need to adjust the schedule to accommodate. Our community is strong, smart, open, collaborative and engaged. We already knew that, but it’s nice to have it affirmed.

More good things are yet to come. Mark Boulton Design is working on the design, brand and copy as well as the brand and editorial style guides, but so much has been accomplished and already had an impact that I thought this was a good time to reflect, assess and say thank you to everyone who has helped us by posting a comment, sitting for an interview, designing a wireframe, doing the card sort, conducting a usability test or being a participant in one. The community support has been truly awesome and, again, thank you, thank you, thank you!

So, are we there yet? Nope, but we are in the home stretch.