usability

Whether you’re a site builder, module or theme developer, or simply an end user of a Drupal website, Drupal 8 has tons in store for you. This ebook will enumerate the major changes in Drupal 8 for end users, for site builders, for designers and front-end developers, and for back-end developers. Note that since Drupal 8 is still under active development, some of the details here may change prior to its release. Drupal 8 is now feature-frozen, so most information should remain relevant. Where applicable, Drupal 7 contributed equivalents of Drupal 8 features will be noted.

1. Breaking or Slowing Down the Back Button 2. Opening New Browser Windows 3. Non-Standard Use of GUI Widgets 4. Lack of Biographies 5. Lack of Archives 6. Moving Pages to New URLs 7. Headlines That Make No Sense Out of Context 8. Jumping at the Latest Internet Buzzword 9. Slow Server Response Times 10. Anything That Looks Like Advertising

In all the testing I have done, home page carousels are completely ineffective.For one, anything beyond the initial view has a huge decrease in visitor interaction. And two, the chances that the information being displayed in the carousel matches what the visitor is looking for is slim. So in that case the carousel becomes a very large banner that gets ignored. In test after test the first thing the visitor does when coming to a page with a large carousel is scroll right past it and start looking for triggers that will move them forward with their task.

Next time you find yourself thinking about using the words “click” or “here” on your links, remember the effects it’ll have on the user experience. The challenge is to make your links say “click here” without actually saying “click here”, and there are many ways to do this. It will take some thought and effort on your part, but in the end, your users will benefit with a better experience of your interface. You can take the easy way out and use “click here” on your links, or you can spend some time to find the right phrasing for your links that’ll click with your users.

We organized the usability issues into four different layers: conceptual, flow, terminology, and interface. In this document we explain what each of these means, and provide key examples and quotes from users. We also propose a quick and concise up-to-speed aid that welcomes users on a new Drupal installation.

see also: http://drupal.org/node/1427940