How We Can All Improve the Drupal Experience
The best part of my job is teaching Drupal. As a Drupal trainer, I get to meet a lot of Drupalers with really different backgrounds. Some are brand-new to Drupal, some have lots of experience. Listening to them tell of their Drupal journeys, both the highlights and the low points, has given me insights into the different ways people encounter Drupal and some of the most common reasons why they love it, use it and get involved in the community (or not).
I've recently been thinking about the Drupal community from a user experience point of view. I regularly host UI meetups for developers and designers, and I'm also volunteering on Drupal's Admin UI initiative, which is creating an accessible administrative interface based on user data and feedback. Both have taught me to empathize with others and understand why they might be feeling excited, warm and fuzzy, anxious, frustrated or curious about Drupal at any given point. It's also given me ideas about what we can all can do to improve the Drupal experience, including:
1. Participate in the community
If you think back to your own best experience with Drupal, there's a decent chance that it was a DrupalCon, DrupalCamp or another time when you had the chance to learn from other Drupalers or share your knowledge with them. It feels inspiring to mentor newcomers, help people solve problems on Drupal Slack or get advice from someone who seems to care. Let's keep it up and look for opportunities to take it further!
2. Recognize the challenges that you and others are facing
There's no point in pretending that using Drupal is always smooth sailing. Hiding the challenging parts of our experiences only makes others feel like they're alone or that they've missed something everybody else has understood. Asking new users around the world to tell me about their pain points has shown me, as just one small example, that Drupal terminology can often be intimidating. We all have our issues, and talking about them is the first step toward finding solutions for them.
3. Get involved with existing initiatives
Community members are on the job when it comes to refining certain aspects of the Drupal experience. The Promote Drupal Initiative has already enhanced Drupal.org's landing page with the persona-specific information its audience was looking for. Their next step will be devising ways to make it easier for new users to find their way into community engagement. And they're not the only ongoing project that could benefit from your time, expertise or financial support: the Out of the Box Experience Initiative, for example, is helping Drupal to make a better and more helpful first impression when it's installed by a prospective user.
4. Imagine new ways of solving problems
The beauty of being part of an open source community is that if you see a problem, you have the power to address it. If you have an idea for helping others have a better Drupal journey, why not try it out? Great user experiences encourage user-base growth and vice versa: a virtuous cycle that I'm committed to supporting.
Inspired by these ideas, I recently decided to run for a position on the Drupal Association's Board of Directors as a "director at large"---a community representative, in other words---because I would love to put my time, energy and knowledge towards growing the community and promoting Drupal to new groups and markets. If you have an active profile on Drupal.org then you can vote in this election here any time before Friday, July 13.
For a video version of this post, here's a recording of my session on the topic at DrupalCamp Montreal: