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Drupal.org is one of the largest and oldest continuously-operating Drupal websites in the world. The amount of content we have is both a blessing and a curse. Historically developed and maintained by community volunteers, Drupal.org has been growing organically for over a decade. New content keeps being added, while no major changes to information architecture and navigation have made it easily findable. With about 1.2 million pieces of content, the need to overhaul Drupal.org has become obvious. But where do we even start?

It is tempting to jump straight into content strategy, kick off a massive content audit, and talk about content types and archival processes. However, to develop comprehensive content strategy, you need to understand what kind of content is actually needed on your site. And to understand that, you need to know your audience.

Researching the Users

We underwent a user research project which lasted from May to August of 2014. Through a public request for proposal (RFP) process, we partnered with Whitney Hess, a user experience coach, to help guide the Drupal Association staff and community volunteers through the research.

The project kicked off with a full-day workshop at DrupalCon Austin. Participants included representatives from the Drupal Association staff and the Board of Directors, community volunteers, and advisors. Together, we brainstormed objectives for the new Drupal.org and metrics of success, as well as provisional user personas – our ideas about what those personas could be.

With that groundwork in place, we set out to validate (or disprove) our assumptions with real people.

We talked to 30 different users of our website located in the Americas and Europe: people who were new to Drupal, long-term community members, ex-Drupalistas, developers, site builders, designers, content strategists, PMs, and more. We sat down for an hour with each one of them and asked numerous questions about the way they use Drupal.org, things they enjoy about it, and their frustrations.

Once we had the data from the interviews, we started to synthesize it and develop personas.