Drupal 7 User Experience (D7UX) for module development

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(notes on a session at DrupalCon 2010)

Full title: How (and why!) to integrate the core Drupal 7 usability improvements with your module

  • D7UX came out of formal usability testing of site administration
  • Seven theme has overlays, menu bar, favorites, actions, operations
  • D7UX isn't finished, it's barely started.  Module developers are going to finish it.  If a module doesn't, file a bug report!
  • Isn't UX audience specific? Not if we want to promote universal best practices. But if you want to turn off Seven, you can.
  • click-to-edit makes editing blocks more intuitive
  • add contextual links to click-to-edit menus
  • if the object in question doesn't already support contextual links, you have to display them.
  • Admin Dashboard: the idea is that contrib modules will supply blocks for the dashboard
  • Local Tasks (sub-tabs)
  • Actions (links right below sub-tabs, encourage proactive behavior)
  • an action is something you do, a task presents data. Don't be afraid to change module's URLs
  • Overlay -- because people lose context when administering a site. To make a path part of the overlay rather than the front-end theme, use hook_admin_paths to specify which paths are admin -- wildcards allowed
  • vertical tabs - fieldsets must be converted to vertical tabs by assigning to same #group as the existing vertical tabs
  • what to do next: go to http://drupal.org/ui-standards , make it better, and complain about it!