Apart from Open Printing, a second “off-the-season” Season of Usability project has formed up:

Bevan Rudge, a student of computer science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, is going to support the developers of the content management platform Drupal usability-wise. His major focus will be user interface improvements for the Drupal core, for item management and local navigation.

This Season of Usability project was initiated on Bevan’s own initiative. As an active Drupal contributor he realised that getting usability into the core is important, but he was lacking practical experience. By participating in a mentored usability project, he now gets an opportunity to enhance his skills, and to give them back to the community: Bevan plans to develop a usability guide and design patterns for the developers.

From Bevan’s project proposal:

“How can something like this be made more useful and usable by developers of both drupal core and contrib? I would like to see usability start at drupal’s roots, rather than being left for an after-thought. (This too-often results in interfaces that are harder to fix than they would have been to get right the first time).”

Usability-wise, Bevan will be mentored by Zoey Kroll and Ron Akanowicz, information architects at CivicActions.

Károly Négyesi (aka chx), a Drupal core developer, will be the technical mentor and implement Bevan’s UI suggestion.

The progress of the project can be followed in the SoU Drupal Group.

We want to thank CivicActions who co-sponsor this student project.

Background

FLOSS Project

Drupal is one of the most widely used open source content management platforms.

Student

Bevan Rudge is a student a student of computer science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has special interest in usability and is a contributor to the
drupal content management platform where he is involved in the usability group and theming group.

Technical Mentor

Károly Négyesi (aka chx) is a core developer of Drupal. He has probably written more code in drupal than any any other single developer.

Usability Mentors

Zoey Kroll and Ron Akanowicz are information
architects at CivicActions. They work on designing the User Experience and Information Architecture of CivicAction’s client’s sites.

Sponsors

Mentoring Organisation