At the OSCMS Summit, Amazon led a workgroup to discuss various issues with Drupal usability. I led a small group specifically discussing the usability of Drupal administration.
Right now, Drupal lumps all of the administrative items under 'administer'. There is no organization to these items at all, and it can be very difficult to figure out how to do tasks that should be relatively straightforward. To this end, we demonstrated the Administration Module.
This module re-organizes your menus into an easier to cope with set of groupings, and provides a master administration page to help those tasks. There are currently two different settings in the administration module, the 'default' settings, put together by David Reed, the author of the administration module, and the 'civicspace' settings, put together by Amazon based upon user surveys.
At this time, we would like to get feedback from the community at large about what groupings make the most sense to people, and which visual format is the most appealing. There are two screenshots available on the module, the first being David's and the second being CivicSpace's. They both take very different approaches, and feedback what is most appealing -- both to look at and to actually use to administrate a site -- could be very useful in determining how to go forward with Drupal.