On the 23rd–25th of June, just before Twin Cities Drupal Camp, we will be conducting usability testing focusing on Drupal 8 at the University of Minnesota. This is a great opportunity to evaluate the current state of Drupal 8 and identify issues that can be resolved before release, or require much of our attention after release.

We'll start on fixing items found during the Twin Cities DrupalCamp Sprints and continue throughout Drupal 8's release cycle.

The University of Minnesota's Usability Services Department has been an amazing long-time supporter of the Drupal project. Hosting us in 2008 just after Drupal 6's release for the first-ever Drupal formal usability study, and again in 2011 just after Drupal 7's release. These usability test results have been invaluable in shaping Drupal's user experience over the years.

What will we be testing?

The tasks for this study will varied and focused around both content creation and site building activities:

• Mobile content creation experience
• Content authoring (preview, menus, in-place editing)
• Layout modeling (placing blocks and editing blocks)
• Content modeling (Field UI, Views)

We will be inviting users with a technical background, of which at least half have experience with Drupal 6/7.

The findings will be presented at Drupalcamp Twin Cities (and hopefully in addition, DrupalCon Barcelona), and all the corresponding issues will be tagged with UMN 2015.

Your help is needed!

We are close to release thus we have a small window of opportunity to fix these problems before Drupal 8 is released.

• Review the test script (should be ready next week, to be finalized by June 15).
• Help find and fix any major user-facing bugs prior to Beta12 (June 17) that will get in the way of users completing the test script. File these under the UMN 2015 prep tag.
• Attend the usability testing, either in-person or remotely (see below).
• Contribute during the Twin Cities DrupalCamp sprint (in-person or remotely in #drupal-usability) to translate problems that were found into actionable Drupal core issues.
• Provide solutions/reviews to the identified issues with the UMN 2015 tag.

Attending the sessions

While space is limited, we are able to accommodate some community members who wish to attend the usability testing sessions either in-person or remotely (over WebEx). In case you are interested please get in contact with Lewis Nyman.

We know that experiencing a usability are quite transformative, and hope that anyone interested reaches out. Sadly, the sessions will not be fully open - as we wish to respect our participants' privacy. Attendees will be required to sign the University of Minnesota Usability Lab's Code of Conduct in order to ensure the privacy of testing subjects is upheld.

We are very excited about learning more about our users and Drupal, and hope to share the results with you as soon as possible!

Yay!