Back in May the Drupal Assocation with the help of the Drupal.org Content Working Group kicked off user research project for Drupal.org. Our goal was to understand who are our users, how do they use the website, what is their ideal user experience. We wanted to understand what are the main segments of our audience and define their priority so we could focus our development efforts. This user research is a first step on the path to a complete Drupal.org redesign. For the redesign to be successful, we wanted to have a complete picture of everyone who uses Drupal.org.

This user research was conducted with the help of Whitney Hess, user experience coach. We are thankful to Whitney for her time and experience she shared with us. It was a great pleasure working with her.

Now to the results we want to share.

The Process

We kicked of the project with a workshop during DrupalCon Amsterdam. Participants included members of the Drupal.org Working Groups (Content, Software and Infrastructure), members of the DSWG Leadership teams (Developer and Community Tools), and the Drupal Association staff members.

Findings from this first workshop you can find in the blog post.

Our next step was user interviews. During DrupalCon Austin and in the weeks following the event we’ve conducted 30 user interviews with various people: new to Drupal, long-term community members, ex-Drupalistas; developers, site builders, designers, content strategists, PMs, etc.; located in North and South America and Europe. Interviews were conducted by Whitney Hess, Joshua Mitchell, Roy Scholten and Tatiana Ugriumova (myself).

Once we had completed several interviews, Whitney and I started synthesizing them and developing personas.

In the middle of July, during our annual all-staff onsite week at the Drupal Association, we had the second workshop of this project. Drupal Association staff and Whitney Hess took a look at the work-in-progress personas and our original objectives, to make sure they still made sense and to prepare them for review by the working groups and board.

The Results

Objectives for a new Drupal.org:

1. Be the home of the Drupal community. Central source of relevant info/answers, collaboration, education and talent.
2. Provide learnable, efficient tools to help coordinate the advancement of Drupal ecosystem.
3. Encourage people to develop themselves, their Drupal proficiency, their careers & build human connections over time.

Based on the insights we learned in our research we decided to center our personas around competency in Drupal and the Drupal ecosystem.

We modified Dreyfus's model of skill acquisition as a basis for our persona structure. This model suggests 5 levels of competency, which for our purposes we call:

• Newcomer
• Learner
• Skilled
• Expert
• Master

For further clarity and focus, we determined primary and secondary personas. Primary personas are who we design for first. Each primary persona requires their own set of features and content, and the needs of a primary persona will not be met if we do not design for them explicitly. The needs of secondary personas can mostly be met by focusing on the primary personas. However, there are a few needs specific to them that we will need to accommodate for.

Based on the goal of growing the community and the usage of Drupal, we determined the primary personas to be: Learner and Skilled. Our secondary persona is Expert. Newcomer and Master are our tertiary personas.

This is a very short summary of the research results. More information and an actual personas can be found in the full report below.

Get the full Drupal.org User Personas report: Google Doc | Pdf

We'd like again to say thanks to Whitney for helping us during this process.

As I mentioned above, user research is the first step of a greater project. Our next step is content strategy work for Drupal.org. We'll be posting RFP for it shortly, watch this blog.