Summer of Code

Submitted by

Bevan Rudge

on Aug 02, 2008

Usability Testing Suite In Beta, Google Summer of Code

1 attachment

The Usability Testing Suite is in Beta! Google Summer of Code student Jimmy "boombatower" Berry has been coding hard and fast all this great usability testing tool. The Usability Testing Suite is intended to be used for remote 'guerilla' usability testing. Currently it allows a usability test designer/engineer to create a study with a bunch of tasks, and invite participants to attempt the task, whilst remotely capturing data about the pages / urls the participant visited, the forms they submitted, what data was entered, and allows the participant to log typed live feedback as they go. More data capturers are planned (outside the scope of SoC) that will make this tool a really valuable asset to the Drupal Usability community.

Submitted by

Bevan Rudge

on May 05, 2008

Scaling Up Usability Testing In Drupal

Still not sure why usability testing is important? See what a linux hobbyist found in an informal usability test on Ubuntu.

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

Submitted by

Bevan Rudge

on Nov 21, 2007

Drupal Mentor Wanted for Season of Usability

1 comment

I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal. As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.