Dinner with Drupal

On Tuesday, June 14, we'll meet for another Dinner with Drupal. Between 17:30 and 19:30 a number of presentations will be given, after which we will have dinner and drinks in town. There are open spots for those who will want to demonstrate interesting new technologies or services, or who will want to pitch ideas. Please contact us, so we can put you in the schedule.

We welcome everybody who uses Drupal, or everybody who wants to start using it. You don't have to be a guru to attend. There will be developers, designers, businesspeople, newbies and hardcore users. Over the past few editions of this event, attendees have come from all across the Netherlands and Germany.

Speakers
Antje Lorch: There's a setting for that, wasn't there, somewhere?

Site builders - as well administrators with sites they can structure - have one of the more neglected user experiences in Drupal. This despite the ability to (re-)structure sites is one of Drupals more unique selling-points.

Building sites you encounter inconsistent, confusing, administration design for yourself, and for your clients. With this experience we must work to fix them for site builders, administrators and end users.
As a module, or core developer, there is much that can be done to make this better: Working out patterns for consistency and navigability, effective and efficient ways of describing what a module does, deciding what level of detail is needed where, etc.

In this presentation I'll outline examples of problems I've encountered as a site builder but also as a member of the Docs WG and the UX team: the problem of finding a page or a setting; over-complicating matters when existing functionality is undocumented or not labelled clearly; confusion when the same word means something different in three different modules or when the same concept is named very differently per module; or causing a security problem when you just want to change an admin overview.

For some of these problems there are already resources and solutions that can be applied, for others there are some ideas I would like to present and discuss.