Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

UX Techniques and Drupal: Practical issues to hammer out

Most of the techniques I’ve laid out here could work for any web project. How, you might be asking, would they be different in Drupal?

The main differences you’ll see working with these documents in Drupal is the pieces of the design puzzle you’re building, and how they fit together. The Drupal framework has certain things baked into it—for example, the concept of Views or Blocks—and these can inform many of your deliverables in ways that aren’t necessarily true for other implementations. At the same time, it’s important to remember that the purpose of deliverables is to communicate; while your developers would probably understand intuitively that content on a particular wireframe would be coming from some Drupal module or field, inserting this logic into client-facing deliverables can cause confusion.

For this reason, many designers have developed a layered approach to client-facing UX deliverables. In a persona, for example, you might include the user’s Drupal role (which determines the permissions they have on your site) under their name, but you might also include the user’s assumed market segment to help the client understand who the persona represents. In a wireframe, you might stick to a more basic boxes-and-labels approach for showing the client, but you might have a separate “annotations” layer that shows the implementation team where specific content is coming from within Drupal.

The Design and Prototyping guide offers ...