Drupal for Designers

Chapter 3. User Experience—Techniques for Drupal

The methods and documentation you use for UX work will vary based on the project. For some clients you’ll find yourself doing elaborate user personas and backing them up with weeks of research; for others a quick and dirty approach—in which you use existing information on customers to create a persona that you test as you prototype—is more than appropriate. The point of UX documentation is to always do some, but to only do the things that make sense for the project.

This chapter highlights some methods that I’ve found helpful. Many of them are borrowed from traditional UX methodologies; however, most of them have been adapted in one way or another for my Drupal workflow. Over time, you’ll find a method that works for you. If anything, the key to creating UX documentation is to find a balance between an efficient workflow for you and creating something that effectively communicates the desired outcome of the project.

User Personas

A good user persona describes a specific person (or type of person) who uses your site, and focuses on documenting the reasons that type of user wants to visit the site, including specific tasks he or she wants to achieve. Every team does this differently, but there are a few components that make a persona valuable in the design process:

It involves real data

If you don’t have access to actual client interviews or surveys, talk to your client about their clients, and get some real data about what they need from ...