Commons/Organic Groups experience for busy baby-boomer professionals
Hello. I am wondering what people's experience is with user-testing or actual deployment of OG/DC on their website/community/users.
I find it easy to get around the Commons features now, but I am invested and motivated in doing so. So I must take my own opinion out of the equation.
When I have users test our iteration of it, they get annoyed and fustrated, esp. as a brand new user, trying to figure out how to participate. I give users the task to "participate in a discussion", or "initiate a discussion" or something like that, and they can't figure out how to do it. The biggest major hurdle for them was figuring out that they first had to register, and then going through the registering process successfully. I would say that the users I tested are not so incredibly tech-savy, but represent the average business user's technical ability, for the Washington DC area. I would say that their technical ability is roughly on par with those whom we are hoping to attract to our site. So, if we are looking to have these people play in our playground, then of course we want to eliminate all possible sources of their fustration, so that they might do so. The Commons release that we have running on our new website in development is not the very latest. It's one or two releases ago. But while I do see change/improvement in making an intuitive look and feel, I think that there is still more to do. Switching to this most current release isn't going to significantly reduce my user's frustration.
So, I'd like to know if anyone else can speak to their experience in user-testing Commons/Org Groups, or in their users' experience with it once deployed. Also, what is your users' demographic?
We seem to have mostly very busy, mostly female, graduate-degree baby boomers. They know their MS Office! (but that's about it.)
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My Recent Posts
If you take a look at some of my most recent posts, there's some rich information in there regarding user experience. While much of it is written from first person, it's a reflection of our site being opened to users over the past couple of weeks. The short version is that DC, mostly the pieces that involve OG, still has a way to go to be a complete package, especially in the realm you're speaking of (user-friendliness). I've been around through all the versions and have seen solid progress and am hopeful for more though a bit concerned that there continues to be a lack of any solid information/roadmap for future development; especially with regard to the most pressing of issues.
thanks
thanks for your reply. will look at your history.
I will also take a look at
I will also take a look at Icarus' posts. Sounds interesting. My post is more about what I expect, rather than actual feedback.
I would say one of my stronger points as a developer (more with other CMS systems) is understanding functionality and user-friendliness. At present, I would not present Drupal Commons to my workplace as the proposal for a community package. Unfortunately nowadays, people are used to Facebook and LinkedIn, and both these services do a very good job of being user-friendly.
I do not wish to criticise Commons. I believe very much that if I want it to work with my company then that is my job. But the real question I have to ask myself is, will the task be simpler starting with Drupal and building from their, or starting with Commons. Generally I think the layout is clear, and the lack of colour is no problem. But the initial options presented to users will be confusing, and changing the tabs at group level can not be done via Views. I was even confused when I first came here to post.
My starting point would be the initial options, and the group level options.
1) In my opinion, general users do not want to think what is the difference between Blog Posts, Documents, Discussions and Wikis. I think the confusion would be increased by the fact that when clicking 'Add', for each one the user is presented with the same thing - an add content item interface. As Drupal people we understand why, but a general user probably would not.
2) I would change the group level tabs so that Groups, My groups, Most Active and Featured were displayed on a single page, rather than as tabs, especially as this is quite a jump in layout (from boxed to whole screen).
3) In general, the consitancy is not kept between pages. Again, click around Facebook and LinkedIn, and the layout doesn't change (unless in photos). Navigation is extremely simple.
If I do actually get round to doing any of this, I will post what I did.
I do think Commons has massive potential, but because it is an installation profile for a community package, I think expectations in that area are higher. I really hope I can use it and work with it, which means I need to make the decision to jump in and commit my companies time to changing it, rather than starting with a regular Drupal install.
Nice to see opinionated
Nice to see opinionated feedback. The only way to improve DC as a product is to be critical. Usability testing and good (simple) information architecture is what at least needs to be done with this product and I am certain that this step was skipped, either for lack of time or what one of the brightest Drupal contributors pointed out in his post
http://www.angrydonuts.com/an-observation-about-designers-versus-developers
I am not here to argue and debate, but when I pointed out that My Stuff/My Profile/My Account links to one the same thing and should be revisited, I was swiftly rejected and almost felt that I should mind my own business. I almost did so, but since I invested countless hours on my project using DC, I decided to be that (a**hole) voice and found some support, namely Icarus. I wish I never posted anything, but it seems that as I spend more time studing DC, more and more I feel discouraged to use it and express my displeasure stronger. I don't have a live site and posted my development screenshots hoping a dialog would find a place instead of ignorance and help me solve "some" of my issues.
Unfortunatelly, it is not the case. Replies from people in charge are random and rarely answers people look for. I am amost encouraged to fork this project into different direction and find people that are truly willing to make it a better product with spirit that made Drupal a decent CMS. It is complex project that requires more than 2 people that seem to be involved with this it on part time basis at best. There is decision to be made on your behalf, either create a team that will be dedicated to this project or abandon it and help Acquia look like a reputable company that it wants to be. Money is there, but no effort.
One look at github history project page should point to that. It is March 09
https://github.com/acquia/commons/commits/master/
No hard feelings, just the facts, improvements, fruitful debate and solutions is all that is wanted.
This is always the difficulty
This is always the difficulty with open-source projects. I've seen this a little bit from both sides, as I was involved in a major Joomla extension project which went through stages of being developed quickly and then slowely. There were sometimes a number of unhappy users, and at times I just wanted to say to them 'it's free, it's open-source, if you don't like it, fix it yourself!'. Now, it is clear that that would not be a good approach, because in the end every project wants people to be interested in it.
I think what Acquia have presented is very good, and I also agree with your points about being discouraged. If I was Acquia and had the time, I would re-do this area. I would make the community area as easy to use as possible, and make it a glowing presentation of what DC can do.
On the other side, there is the community. I also think this community so far has not contributed much, and I am including myself here. That is something Acquia can't control. I think a lot depends on the community and what they add to the project (for example, new themes).
Still, I agree with you on the usability. I think there is a need for usability testing and feedback. I think if anyone looks at this community area from a non-developers point of view, they could very quickly have a list of 4-5 things that affect usabulity for normal users. Unfortunately, community sites depend on ease-of-use, probably much more than other types of software.
As I also suggested in a post in the Open Atrium community, I think a new template would be a good community project. I think our opinions and solutions are much stronger if we produce something as well.
A Non-developer Perspective
This is one of the better discussions I've seen lately regarding the usability of DC, so I thought I would weigh in. We are currently evaluating DC for what will (hopefully) be a large-scale project involving a lot of relatively small DC installations. The alternative would be to cherry-pick the specific functionality we need and build it on Drupal 7, basically because we have some complex data sharing requirement that would be facilitated in Drupal 7 and there are a few modules we might rather use (Facebook-style Statuses, for example, once it is ported) . Suffice it to say, my preference is to use a distribution that is already supported by a company like Acquia...that is potentially very important to me.
Wikis, Blogs, Documents...This is a good point but I haven't reached a good decision on how to resolve it. Most normal users have no idea what to do with a Wiki, but it's a valuable type of content, used sparingly, for a lot of organizations. We've seen in discussions here how NOT to use them...you can't have comments enabled or it simply becomes 1/2 wiki 1/2 discussion. Or maybe its just that the editing interface needs to be markedly different than blogs, pages, documents, etc. By the way, I think the Document option is very confusing to most people and I only want it used when users are uploading files to the site. I think most people are familiar enough with Blogs by now to leave that alone.
Community Contribution...I'm a firm believer in the whole "squeaky wheel" theory, and I will admit to being fairly disappointed with the response I've gotten to issues I've submitted on the Commons issue queue. That said, I'm not going to lay into Acquia too much here. What they've put together is an extraordinary distribution, even if we do decide to approximate a lot of what they have have done in Drupal 7. At the same time, with few exceptions (like the Idea Management module, which is a fantastic contribution, although I haven't tried to implement it yet), I haven't seen very much coming from the users, either in the way of bug fixes, new themes, or additional features. Just because they're a for-profit company, I don't think they should be expected to carry the load by themselves. As a non-developer, it's difficult to add very much here, but if we move forward with DC, I would certainly hope help out where possible. Right now, it seems like there should be a page on this site detailing the D7 migration status of all the necessary DC modules, as anything that might facilitate that process would seem advantageous at this point. If there is a complaint for Acquia, it seems like they might generate more response from the user community if they took development out of the black box a bit. Just a thought.
Usability...I agree that there are some basic, potentially critical usability issues for the less-adept (perhaps even the more-adept) users out there. For example, primary menu space is simply too precious to have separate links for a Dashboard and My Stuff...basically, my opinion is that My Stuff should point to the Dashboard. In working with the 1.4 version, however, I had very little difficulty in changing the homepage layout and menu structure to fit my needs. Let me stress that I am absolutely not a developer, although I am fairly experienced with Drupal and some other CMS at this point. I do have some bigger issues, like the problems with the wysywyg editor and a problem with filepaths on uploaded files, that are not so easy to work around.
Themes...I've been hoping to see more in the way of theme development specific to DC, particularly considering the general ease of customizing fusion themes. Unfortunately, I'm not in the position to make this contribution myself, although perhaps if our project has legs that may come down the road a bit. I will say that the instructions posted several months ago for modifying the DC theme (new one looks great, by the way) still work splendidly, and by simply changing a few graphics files and adding an absurdly short local.css file you can completely change the look of the distribution, within certain limitations anyway. In fact, I'll try to add my local.css to the instructions page I referenced earlier.
Anyway, have a great weekend everyone.
"For example, primary menu
"For example, primary menu space is simply too precious to have separate links for a Dashboard and My Stuff...basically, my opinion is that My Stuff should point to the Dashboard."
https://picasaweb.google.com/102649247313375566845/DropBox?feat=directlink#5572872684352186418
Thank you
Community contribution. I didn't want to be too defensive about what we're doing in my responses. Thank you for saying what I'd rather not have said myself. :-)
Honestly, we have lots of Commons work we're doing. But we really do hope the community will start to pitch in, too. This is open source; we will all be better off if Acquia isn't trying to do it all here. Frankly, if the community views Acquia as the only source of advancement for Drupal Commons, then we'll miss a big opportunity. The strength of Commons will come from being a successful open source project with lots of contributors. That's how open source wins. I look forward to seeing it happen.
WIkis, blogs, documents. Though I can sense the frustration of 1/2 wiki 1/2 discussion, I don't think there's actually a way around it. Some things need to be "always authoritative", while there needs to be back & forth in other areas to discuss options. Wikipedia doesn't have discussions about what should be on the wiki pages. (They have discussion companion pages for it). Plus, not every group needs a set of "authoriative pages"; sometimes just casual interaction is all people in a group want. So I'm not sure how to solve the problem either; I think both interaction styles exist because they must.
Usability. See my other responses here.
Themes. We've started to encourage a couple of Acquia's business partners to work on Themes. They've sent over some mockups. They've already started to tackle some of the usability issues. (This actually raises an interesting problem, too: Do we ship multiple themes, with multiple page layout options, or pick one, or ... Problem solution TBD.)
Thanks for reply. I really
Thanks for reply. I really can't really agree with the open-source project point. Open sourcing something does not mean that your intentions are true. Acquia is for profit company responisble to their investors, but it is built on open source product, and it is using open source as a marketing foundation to compete with other "non open-source" companies. Google gives you Gmail for free and other stuff as well, it is built with open source technology, but it does not mean it is open source company same as Acquia.
The only quick response from Acquia was home call from their sales department. Even if I provided phone number, I should receive an email which asks me if it is OK to call me on Friday evening when I am at home with my family not other way around. Open source is in a way a quasi-religion. Those that get ordained as priests take upper hand and majority is still expected to put on the plate every Sunday and bow down to the leaders. My only problem is that I confessed.
A quick example is OG module or can full of warms. Creators and mainteners of the product refuse to update obvious flaws even if money has been offered. Users that ask for improvement have no skills to do it themselves which does not mean that they do not see flaws. On the other hand, OG priests are bragging how they make Economist magazine run, do this and that, give presentations at conferences and so on. Yet they forgot the roots of their "success" and that is nonetheless human nature.
"I also think this community so far has not contributed much". This is also wrong as my link to article about developer vs designer points out. If contribution is only meant that I write the code than it is pointless to discuss this. Others and myself proposed numerous improvements already, but have not changed the code in SVN per se. I am not PHP developer, but person that cares about user experience and information architecture. My focus is front end and I have already made improvements on my end and whoever asked me how it is done, I tried to provide detailed answer and even send to users my CSS file for them to use. It also does not mean that my solutions are the best. There needs to be consensus and that is what open source projects lack the most.
The idea that because it is open source it is also a democratic process is far from real picture. I can only be a rebel that forks off the project, but I have no time to be Che. As you pointed out, Joomla is such example and it proved the point as why users decide to take a product into different direction can make it ultimatelly a better product.
All I want is to make my website, but lately all my time seems to be invested doing this kind of work. I just wish I could praise the product, but for now I will save the praise.
There's a lot here, and I don't know where to start
I've said other stuff in other comments that could be useful here. I won't repeat. I hope the rest of this won't be too defensive sounding, but it needs to be a little bit.
I will say that contributions do NOT have to come in the form of code. And this "UX designer vs. developer" contribution difference isn't limited to Drupal Commons; it's a malady that affects Drupal at large, and many non-Drupal projects where most contributions come from developers (who aren't by nature good UX designers..).
The big key is to figure out how we - the Commons community - want to handle contributions by designers. The overall Drupal community has gotten better by having committed designers spend time doing mockups, user testing, and hard thinking, then posting designs for comment by coders, and iterating until something is agreed on. I see no reason we can't do that here.
I'm sorry you concluded your suggestions were completely rejected. As I recall (without tracking down the actual post), you identifed the issue, and proposed a general thought - "combine them". But there are lots of details to get right if we want to do that. If I'm remembering correctly, a more complete proposal would have gotten further, I suspect. (If I'm wrong, point me at a URL; I'm willing to be called wrong.)
Also, please understand that we all have our own schedules. As Acquia has gotten ready for Drupalcon, our plates have been full to overflowing. So please don't take non-response as non-care; we have to manage priorities like everybody does. Drupalcon is over, but I've got 2 full weeks of travel coming up to customers. I'll do my best to reply, but have limited time. Mike S. is deep in a Commons customer project, and is wrestling some REALLY gnarly problems we have to solve in Commons. We've given him the freedom to ignore the comments here for a couple of weeks and stay focused, to solve the problems (which explains no GitHub commits for 2 weeks). And the list goes on for the Commons team here. I'll just ask you to acknowledge that a) it takes a lot of manpower to build both the technology and a profit-making business around this open source project, and b) we're supporting the community for free in our spare time; we support our paying Commons customers as first-priority. This may affect the speed of our replies here.
3 replies
Usability
To compare Facebook usabilty with DC is incorrect. Facebook was all about getting a date and sex... simple statuses. It was not meant to create a knowledgebase. An example of this is Facebook's Groups, which are stagnant, the threads are all over, you can't add files, docs. DC is about sharing information.
I am using DC for a strength & conditioning community to network and exchange ideas about S&C. Re. the blogs, docs and wikis, this makes perfect sense for my community. Blogs are used for opinions, docs are for referenced information, wikis is similar to docs, except the group can participate in creating the document. I do not allow for feeds, as I want the community to create the data contain, rather than just pull it from somewhere and then it overloads the websites with useless information.
DC is a base, not a complete package, the same way that Drupal is just a framework. Today I am creating short videos instructing my users how to use the blogs, docs, and wikis. It is the responsibility of the developer or owner of a site to expand the capabilities of DC, as some are already using Ad module to sell advertisement.
Now the best way to contribute to DC is to add docs or wikis to the Expand DC forum.
The biggest issue with DC is the lack of a coherent documentation, perhaps someone writes a book as a cookbook... I also believe once DC is ready for Drupal 7 it is going to be a lot better. I understand the frustration, but if you are not live, and just playing with DC, hey, break it apart, see what you can do, and share back, that is how Open Software moves forward.
But The Base Has Major Issues
This is true and I believe most people expect to do some of their own customization to make Commons what they need it to be. The problem is that the base itself is flawed. It has some critical usability and design issues that make it difficult to use, much less customize. Specifically, there is OG functionality that does not work as advertised. When you can't create a true "Invite Only - Private Group" as is suggested, you're stuck with doing much more than customization. You're also stuck a) helping users understand how to use something that doesn't have an expected behavior and b) waiting to hear whether the maintainers of DC are going to address the flaw.
Semantics..
I think it's an overstatement to say that the "base" has issues. Doing so suggests more fundamental problems with Commons than I believe exist.
I would say that OG does have its issues; but OG is far from being the base. However, OG is also a massively powerful set of tools (even if you assert it has flaws) that enables Commons in the first place. Be careful with your baby and bathwater. :-)
Lots of the usability nits can be cleaned up, IMHO. Let's start tackling them.
Documentation!
Actually, you're not the first this week to bring this up. And in fact, we actually started kicking off a community-based way to create docs here. Watch for more early next week. (Simple stuff - opening up some books, creating a role for documenters, starting on a doc hierarchy / outline, etc.)
Oh, and thanks for the rest of your comments. My point (above/below) exactly.
DC vs Drupal + off-the-shelf modules
Recently, I've been wondering about the pros and cons of using DC as a platform vs just "rolling my own" out of standard Drupal.
I build a local community using DC and have been slow to put effort into growing it, while trying to figure out where DC is headed, what level of support to expect, and where the value-added is.
One thing that seems clear is that, unlike standard Drupal (at least, for the most part) , one can't just assume that a module will work within DC, limiting expansion options.
So, I'm wondering if there are folks who have actually moved from DC to (or back to) Drupal and, if you have done so but are still checking in here, what your experience has been.
I'm sorry if it's impolite to ask this here, within DC, but repeated requests for roadmaps and status updates seem to go unanswered, leading me to wonder where this is all headed.
39 revisions
Good to see discussion coming into my inbox.
The comparison to facebook is valid. Like it or not, Facebook is today's defacto standard, and what most users these days are used to in terms of UI for the purpose of "online collaboration". Same for Twitter, and some of the others. Regardless of their orgins, they are here, now, and flourishing to the point that this experience - the twitter or facebook experience - is something along the lines of what users expect. Esp. those that don't do social media otherwise. And it's alot of those people that don't otherwise do social media outside of FB/Twitter, whom we are hoping will make a special exception for us, because they are invested in belonging to our specialized knowledge community.
f anyone is interested in the 39 revisions to the out-of-the-box functionality and design that I came up with, to improve my user's experience, I'd be glad to share. I hesitate here, as you'd have to see a screen shot of the site for my list to make sense, on some items. I can't make screenshots public yet.
@drupalio "To compare
@drupalio
"To compare Facebook usabilty with DC is incorrect. Facebook was all about getting a date and sex... simple statuses. It was not meant to create a knowledgebase."
Clearly I have not been getting the best out of facebook..........!!! :)
crougeau has made a pretty good point already about facebook. I do not see this as just being about knowledgebaases. We can't ignore facebook because people are used to it, even if what we are aiming for is a different market. It is the same with Windows and MacOS. Any software now has to be pretty, because most people are used to Windows or MacOS.
It is interesting how you are using the Blogs, Discussions and Wikis. That makes sense, although I still think there would be confusion due to the similarity of each of these. For most users I know that are 'power users', blogs are Wordpress, Discussions are phpbb forums and Wikis look like Wikipedia. And each view (as in page) at present in Commons is quite different to the last.
Still, as I also said above, I completely agree that this is the developers job. I am not saying Acquia should have to make all these changes. If I want something for my company, I create it (or pay someone else to do it). However, I do think the potential user base will suffer because of these things. All these projects benefit from larger communities.
D
D
I thought this bit was very
I thought this bit was very interesting, and would love to hear more on this:
If I am right, Open Atrium is actually Closed Atrium, because one cannot publish a node to several groups. For example: a general manager would like to publish the annual report to the whole organization (to every group), but can he/she? If I am correct, then I think this makes OA useless, especially as an intranet. In DC, we can.
There is a paradox: DC is better suited for intranets, OA for social networking, if the groups are not related to each other and there is no hierarchical/organizational dependencies between groups. Perhaps this feature in OA was left out from the open source version intentionally (to me the only explanation).
I think you are being harsh on OA, but the paradox is interesting to think about. I would say this also applies to the default look of the two projects. OA looks much more like a social community package, DC looks more like an intranet. But OA has case tracker, and this is definitely more of a intranet feature.
I did not know a node could be published to all groups in DC. Never seen anyone request this for OA.
This is becoming a very useful discussion!
What a great thread
First, please let me say I'm happy to see all the passion here. This kind of passion suggests people care about Commons, and that's what it takes for it to succeed.
The best way to direct that passion is to contribute. Drupal is commonly-referred to as a "do-ocracy", and the phrase "talk is silver, code is gold" is oft-heard. You can always do that at the Drupal Commons GitHub archive.
There's a couple of comments in this thread that are worth remarking about. I'll do it by replying to specific comments below.
Thanks for starting this conversation; I think it can - and should - spawn specific discussions about specific problems.
Overall
@crougeau re: the original post and @icarus re: the first comments. I agree with you - we can improve the UX of Commons. We (Acquia) took the Agile-style approach of "Release first, then iterate based on what you learn". We can't iterate instantly, but we're definitely looking at this internally, and have the same complaints you do. Part of this is a function of how Organic Groups works "off the shelf." One of development philosophies was to -- INITIALLY -- use existing modules as much as possible, and look at how we can do better through integration as a whole, vs. doing lots of coding on specific modules. That didn't exactly work - we've already invested a healthy amount in many modules. How OG does all it does hasn't been something we've tackled yet, though.
So all in all, I agree that we can improve the UX. NOTE: We also intentionally modeled the UX on the UX of "another notable Social Business Software" solution (cough, cough, Jive, cough, cough), thinking they'd solved a bunch of the UX issues. Turns out their software isn't rocket science, and the UX isn't all that swell. We think we can - and should - do better.
All that said, I (and the rest of Acquia) hope that the beauty of open source will show up here once we start to see wide adoption. As that happens, the normal open source / Drupal effect should show up: We'll see other community members advancing the technology - not just Acquia. We hope this works like Drupal modules work: We're the maintainer, and do a lot of work, but are more than happy to have others contribute, and happy to pull in those contributions. Thus, my reminder that GitHub is the best outlet for solving your frustrations with Commons. :-)
Acquia's role
Hi Jay,
What a respectful way to maintain and engage in dialog. Thanks.
Any chance we could hear whether Acquia could devote any resources to sharing more information, on an ongoing basis, about progress, next steps, roadmaps, questions for your users, etc.?
It seems like there have been periods when questions are left unanswered and we end up not knowing where things are headed. Having some resources focused on making sure that users aren't left in the dark would be helpful.
Yay for Feedback!
Jay, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to provide some feedback on this thread. I think you'll find that someone from Acquia taking a few minutes at least once a week to tend to some things like this will make a HUGE difference. A few quick responses:
"We're the maintainer, and do
"We're the maintainer, and do a lot of work, but are more than happy to have others contribute, and happy to pull in those contributions. Thus, my reminder that GitHub is the best outlet for solving your frustrations with Commons"
UX/IA issues are hard to be resolved through Github contribution. OG, Heartbeat/Dashboard issues perhaps can.
UX/IA needs an expert, Usability and Design group was a right start, but it requires different approach.
"devote any resources to sharing more information, on an ongoing basis, about progress, next steps, roadmaps, questions for your users, etc.? It seems like there have been periods when questions are left unanswered and we end up not knowing where things are headed. Having some resources focused on making sure that users aren't left in the dark would be helpful."
DC became passion (frustrasted at times) through my passion for sports and technology. I offered some insights, but UX/IA issues cannot be resolved through random posts and need more focused group
Noticed recent improvements with UX/IA with recent Acquia website update (much better work).
Evaluating product's capacity to meet its intended purpose can be only done in this way. Hopefully, not to critical.
My two cent ... more after I toke the time to read all comments
Really great post. Sorry if I give my 2 cent just before going to read all the very interesting comments. I will, promised. Allow me to say that for many times I did not have the necessary experience to give an objective and neutral statement about what is really "Open Source" and what make it so attractive, dynamic, alive and awesome! I also had a time that my direct experience with open source lead me in a period of intensive and intuitive production of ideas on how to enhance the software I was just give it a try. In this case and post OG module is the main argument but as I know that could be any awesome contributed module coming from the Drupal Community. As a Drupal expert long time user and now Evangelist I really feel the spirit of Open Source and even I am still a beginner in developing and coding (after more the 5 year as a Drupal Community member) I can praise all people that jumping in the Open Source Community and that started to struggle in step in different learning curve of different branches of open source software and OSs make it to build their own new job perspective, build on top of open source great Company like Acquia (and many many others, excuse if I do not list them all here) and still give back in different quantity, quality and continuity to the Communities.
All of them are people that did really understand the spirit behind open source. I confess that even to me it was not easy to dive in without frustration periods and awesome freedom and success moments. So I really identify and confront any simple as polite critics to the way open source organize and distribute new knowledge with serenity and optimisms. Who ever start to try to put fire on some really magic phenomena on how open source devolve and develop and distribute ideas and enhancements will see hoe this kind of fire light off very quickly.
Thanks @Jay for your patient, thank everybody for they comments and more over new suggestions and documentation indications, that's one awesome part of the dynamic life of open source spirit of contribution and grow.
Kind Regards
I thnk Jay is right about the
I thnk Jay is right about the community. It really is down to us, not Acquia. I do think the current UX is going to put off new users, but would not expect Acquia to put together a specialist team to do that, when it is open-source. On the other hand, I'm sure they want to do what they can to keep the new users coming in.
Today I'm going to have a look at making the pages more consistant. For example, the Home page and Groups pages have different styling. This will put users off. then on the Groups main page there is no continuity of modules (as it takes a whole page view). Need to have a play with the panels.
Who is US? UX and other
Who is US?
UX and other issues are already putting existing users off. What makes new users different, perhaps new?
Acquia already put a team of "specialists" together to create DC. (unless Jay refers to himself in the first person plural - First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the writing.)
I guess you meant consistent.
They already have specialist looking into theming/styling so issues with panels would be really something to look into and improve.
By the way, I used to live in country/society of "US/community/equality". Sadly, it ended up in civil war bringing out the worst humanity can offer.
This rethoric reminds me of that combined with previous evangelism post (hard to get ordained though, unless being minorite is fine - truly/only noble - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/24/grigori-perelman-reclusiv_n_511938.html ).
But enough of me. I will just have to hang up my gloves. Good luck.
Caeci caecos ducentes.
Not sure if I understand the
Not sure if I understand the question well, but will try to explain what I meant.
The 'us' means this community. All of us.
I think I have a different perspective because I have worked within the team of an open-source project. The main reasons companies make products open-source is 1) for more exposure 2) to allow the product to grow / improve quicker becuase of the community.
The worse thing is when many users say to the development team 'you are not doing enough', 'where are the updates?', 'this is not good enough' because then the team can lose motivation. The best thing is when other users contribute and add to the project. This shows that people want to get involved.
Acquia will do whatever Acquia do. Maybe they will improve the UX, maybe not. If they have a team working on it, great. But the whole concept of open-source is the community contributions. Look at Drupal. How much of what you use is made by the core developers, and how much is from the community? If you use a different free theme, Views, and CCK, then they are all from the community.
This is what needs to happen with Commons. This is open-source - we can do the improvements.
Who are the blind?
Blind are led by the blind. Leaders are not more knowledgeable than the ones they lead
have you found the lightness?
Sorry, no idea what that
Sorry, no idea what that means...... :)
If it is related to what I said then here is an answer that may or may not be related to what you said ............................... With open-source community projects, it's important to to look at it from the other side, and ask yourself why companies make their software open-source....
Two things
I changed the groups posting of this so that it is cross-posted to the Usability & Design group.
It turns out that there are two organizations that have been thinking about a UX refactoring on Commons. One has sent me some mockups of a new design (UX & chrome), and another some wireframes suggesting how they'd improve commons UX.
I'm going to propose that we take the objections raised in this thread, and start collaborating on a revised UX for Commons in another thread - in the Usability & Design group. I'll try to get permission from the other two groups to post their ideas there, and we can use that as a starting point for a collaborative process on making the UX for Commons even better. We probably need to come up with some process and possibly some toolsets, but I think this will be great.
If you haven't joined the Usability & Design group, you might do so.
Like Button
Where's the Like button? I'd hit it three times for this. Rock on, Jay!
Like Button
Like button (similar though) Easily added by 2 modules, Voting API, Vote up/down
and little css so it does not interfere with the comment
.vud-widget-upanddown {float:right;}.vud-widget{float:right;}
End Result: https://picasaweb.google.com/102649247313375566845/DropBox#5584904313954720114
Voting API: http://drupal.org/project/votingapi
Vote up/down: http://drupal.org/project/vote_up_down Also note:
Shoutbox bubble image background is not transparent in DC. Modified image to download (trasnsparent background) if background / .even or .odd class different colour. As long as existing border is the same colour (in DC and I kept it so - no need to change it. If changed image has to be adjustedto that colour as well.)
Tansparent both sides (if white)https://picasaweb.google.com/102649247313375566845/DropBox#5584914984874952402 Transparent on the outside, but grey on the inside - my. odd class colour (change to your colour) https://picasaweb.google.com/102649247313375566845/DropBox#5584910555318150082 Interesting developments / stuff otherwise. Like it.
Under Wraps?
I'm curious, is there any reason this is being kept under wraps (i.e. not informing the community here?) It looks incredibly promising. I can think of a couple of reasons to perhaps not fill everyone in, but I don't like to assume :)
You're reading too much into this
We're not keeping anything under wraps... We're doing the normal Drupal-shop thing - we're doing work for customers, then returning what code we can to the community. In this case, it's first to the Drupal.org project / maintainer, then to Commons later -- assuming we (and you!) want it. :-)
Please remember that we at Acquia don't only work on Commons out of the goodness of our hearts. ;-) We actually do build things for customers using Commons. In this case, Mike is working on a project for a customer where they wanted a bunch of improvments to a module. He needs to get the maintainer of that module to accept his patch - and also wants to volunteer to be a co-maintainer.
I do think this work will get into Commons; but it's not like we're working on Commons stuff on our own, in secret, and keeping it under wraps. It's just that this is where Mike is in the process - doing customer work now, which gets into Commons later.
Cool?