Drupal 8 User Experience

Last updated on
19 February 2021

The Drupal 8 User Experience initiative's goal was to radically improve our content creation and sitebuilder tools for Drupal 8. We laid out a UX strategy. Below we have outlined the most important topics we wanted to improve in Drupal 8, 9, and beyond.

The Usability Group is not actively working on these initiatives at this time. To find out about the current activities of the Usability group, visit the Contribute to Usability page.

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Content creation

Node/add page improvements
The content creation experience is at the center of Drupal, it's one of those screens that we want to keep improving. For Drupal 8 we want to drastically improve the design of the content creation page. We have done research and now in the process of brainstorming ideas.

Content listing
The current content listing is basic and often isn't useful for content creators. We intend to iteratively improve this page and add features such as searching.

WYSIWYG
A WYSIWYG editor has been the number one requested feature for Drupal core in the past few years. We are currently working towards a candidate in a sandbox project.

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Site builder

Layout/context
Contextual blocks that can be rearranged and organized into flexible layouts through a drag and drop interface. This initiative needs major involvement of contributors both in terms of design as development to redesign the way we currently handle blocks. We currently are still researching how to make this all happen.

Field UI
The Field UI has fundamental issues that cannot be solved by tweaking the existing interface. This needs a major overhaul along the lines of form builder field UI, which will tie in heavily with the layout/context initiative.

  • Technical prototyping is happening in a sandbox of swentel.
  • Accessibility review and development, to make this interface truly accessible.

Menu UI
The UI while managing menu items in Drupal is not very comfortable to use once you have say 300 items in a list. It becomes a tough job to manage when you have multiple level of menu items and you really want to re-organise them or say bulk edit them.

Extending Drupal
Extending Drupal core is a hard task, users struggle to understand that you can extend Drupal and then how to find and install the right project.

Mobile
Design Drupal 8's UX for devices with small screens and touch screens.

Focused install profile
Drupal core lacks focus in any of its core install profiles. The Snowman initiative plans to change this and provide a profile focussed on building a small community website.

  • Research and discuss usecases for snowman.

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Community

Research activities
We have done a lot of research this cycle, to understand the problems that users run into and how our new improvements perform.

Growing the UX-Team
The UX-team is very small and we want to educate more developers and engage more designers.

  • Feedback sessions for initiatives
  • Weekly Zoom meetings on Fridays at 10:00 ET (Zoom link can  be found in the #ux Slack channel)
  • Close collaborations with designers, researchers and developers on (contrib) projects.
  • Drupal event sessions on Drupal 8UX, pattern library, user experience, and design in opensource

Building a pattern library
We are in the process of building a pattern library, which will contain the majority of standardized UI patterns within Drupal Core. The goal is to improve this library further, add missing patterns, and add useful tutorials to make your contrib project more usable.

  • Requires additional patterns and descriptions in Listings, Form elements and Information Architecture
  • Research on consistency across form errors, buttons, and flow.

Drupal.org UX improvements

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