Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

Getting Your Hands Dirty with UX

Being a user experience designer in the Drupal community can be challenging. In many of the conversations I’ve had with designers and Drupal teams across the world, user experience deliverables are combined with project management activities, which can lead to a loss of focus on UX as the project moves forward and attention moves to time and resource management. Additionally, as the term user experience becomes more firmly established as an essential component of the web design puzzle, the question of what user experience actually means has become a topic of debate—and the Drupal community is certainly not an exception.

For the record, when I talk about user experience, I define it as:

• A set of design principles that focuses on learning about the actual people using a site in a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, way. Numbers can be useful for segmenting markets and planning a campaign; user experience requires observing real people, and seeing beyond statistics.

• A set of design principles that balances the needs of a business with the needs of their customers in a way that encourages a positive relationship.

• An activity that every member of the project team—from the official UX designer to project stakeholders—is responsible for, and that is best achieved by working collectively towards a common goal.

I do not, however, define user experience as:

• Creating a stack of wireframes or site maps in a vacuum.

• Creating and running usability tests.

• Creating ...