Three weeks ago, I launched a Drupal.org survey, the objective of which was to get feedback on the Drupal.org website and to prioritize the work we should put into improving it. The results of this survey are below.

Target audience

In total, 375 people responded to the survey. The first graph shows who responded to the survey and how often they visit Drupal.org. It defines Drupal.org's target audience. As can be seen, most Drupal.org visitors are Drupal administrators that visit this site frequently.

Purpose of visit

When asked where they spent most of their time, they responded as follows:

Most people spend their time in the forums looking for answers/support. Thus, most people would benefit from forum improvements though, as we'll see later, this is not the problem area. Surprisingly (at least to me), 17% of the people spent most of their time in the bug/patch/issue trackers.

Drupal.org development focus

Next, we asked the participants to agree or disagree with a number of statements using a Likert scale. The statements and the accumulated result, are given below.

The full statements:

1. We should improve the structure/organization of the forums.
2. In the forums, we should show who is who, and who did what.
3. The support mailing list should be eliminated in favor of the support forums.
4. On the download pages, it should be possible to navigate projects by category.
5. It should be possible to rate projects, and to browse projects by their rating.
6. We should improve drupal.org's main navigation structure.
7. We should improve the navigation structure of the Drupal handbooks.
8. We should improve the quality of the documentation in the Drupal handbooks.
9. We should extend the amount of documentation in the Drupal handbooks.
10. We should improve the search functionality at drupal.org.
11. We should improve the "recent posts" page so posts can be filtered by type, category, etc.
12. We should provide e-mail notifications for new forum topics or replies.
13. We should provide RSS notifications for new forum topics or replies.
14. I would like to flag, bookmark or tag content/pages that interest me.

Overall experience

Last but not least, we polled the user for its overall experience. Turns out that most people do appreciate the work we put into maintaining Drupal.org and that most people are happy with the site. 58% of the participants rated their overall experience as 'good' and 29% as 'very good'.

Nonetheless, there is room for improvement and we're committed to bettering your Drupal.org experience. We'll start by implementing the prioritized TODO list below.

TODO list

1. Improve the Drupal.org search. This requires search module improvements. Fortunately, these improvements are well on their way. More about these later.
2. Make it possible to browse projects by category. Requires project module inprovements. The grunt work has been taken care of by Nedjo but we're not there yet. More code needs to be written, and ultimately, all projects need to be categorized using card sorting. We talked to OpenUsability, and they are working on a card sorting tool that we could use.
3. Make it possible to rate projects. Requires project module improvements. We have concrete ideas as how to approach this once the first two items are in place. In particular, we want to categorize projects by (i) popularity (number of downloads, or number of installations) and by (ii) rating. The former rating is computed automatically, the latter is the result of a manual rating system where each user gets to cast a vote.
4. For returning visitors (and the vast majority of our visitors turn out to be returning visitors), it's important that they can easily track new or relevant content, as well as continue where they left off last time. Therefore, we hope to improve the "recent posts" page (tracker module) as well investigate how we can implement e-mail and RSS subscriptions. Unless some people step forward to help, it will probably take a couple months before we get to this last item.

(Note: we have a couple more survey results but we'll talk about this in a separate post.)