30 Oct 2017

UX notes week 44

A selection of Drupal design topics and issues that are moving or should be :)

Small big win: status report pattern reuse in the migrate UI

A nice success from last week was closing a critical issue for Migrate UI. Particularly pleased that we were able to apply a new “summary” user interface element we recently introduced on the status report page.

Big one: redesign the administrative UI

There was a big interest in this over several meetings and workshops at Drupalcon Vienna and after. Seven theme hasn’t evolved much over the last years and it shows.

The right issues are not yet in place for this but I see and hear multiple people thinking about this. There’s multiple parts to this, of course:

1. A visual update. What would the next version of this style guide look like?
2. Improve the information architecture. Lots of solid thinking around this already.
3. Introduce new interaction patterns. We still mostly rely on tables, select lists and other basic form elements. Experiments with JavaScript frameworks should help here but we should design these starting from user needs.
4. Modernize the underlying theme architecture.
5. Update and extend the user interface standards documentation.

Drupal core could use another usability test

The core feature set has grown considerably over the last couple of 8.x releases. On the one hand it would be smart if we found a way to do more smaller tests more often. On the other hand, since it’s been more than 2 years since the last big usability test we could do with one of those as well. Lets figure out what we can do. Check in here if you’re interested in helping with this.

Something to look forward to: Layout builder

The layouts-in-core team has been steadily working towards this. Looks like we are in great shape and on track to really honestly add a visual layout builder to core. There’s a patch going through the last stages of review and refine in https://www.drupal.org/node/2905922. One cool smart detail is that this will also introduce a dynamic way to dynamically generate icons for different types of layouts. Very nice indeed.

Permissions UI

Core and contrib modules often come with their own (set of) permissions. It’s how you can configure which roles get access to do what. This permissions UI is currently an ever growing sea of checkboxes. This does not scale, for user nor machine. The current model of a grid lists all available permissions in rows and all roles in columns needs a thorough rethink. Lets figure out a plan for how to do that.

Also,

• A very worthy effort to provide better defaults in Field UI
• Needs review: Improve database credential form
• Needs review: When you remove the “Breadcrumb” block in Seven, there’s no top padding for the main content

& some more pointers to where you can go to find out what’s going on.

Enjoy your week!

Tags

drupalplanet