UX Design and the Admin Interface

The problem

We tend to focus on the the people visiting our websites, but the people who manage the websites we build are users too and all too often their experience is overlooked. A CMS is a tool, and tools which offer a poor user experience are unlikely to be used, or worse yet, they’ll be used incorrectly. As designers, themers and site builders, it is our job to craft a user experience for our clients that will make managing their site a pleasant, intuitive process.

About this session

I will present two case studies of Drupal sites currently in progress. The first is for Manning, Leaver, Bruder & Berberich—a small law firm in Los Angeles. The second is for the California Science Center—the largest hands-on science museum on the west coast. These sites represent very different types of users with very different requirements, giving us a nice range of issues to look at. In both cases, I will concentrate on how authenticated users interact with the site to manage its content. Note that both of these sites are being built in Drupal 6, but the concepts I’m discussing are still relevant in Drupal 7 and beyond.

Some of the issues I’ll discuss include:

• How to support the needs of your users, and only the needs of your users.
• The evil’s of the Drupal interface and why you should hide them.
• Building your own admin tools using common everyday items.
• Publication workflows and the dangers of editing a live website.
• Luddite users and the limitations of training.

It is my hope that this session can transition into a Birds of a Feather discussion of user experience issues surrounding website administration. So please bring your own examples to share and questions we can discuss as a community.

Who should attend

A solid understanding of Drupal basics will be assumed, but anyone building a Drupal site—whether a designer, themer, or hard-core developer—would benefit from this discussion. I will be touching on design elements, creative uses of available modules and yes, I may even show some custom code, so I expect there will be a little bit for everyone.