Last weekend I went to incredibly warm Southern California to present at Drupal Camp San Diego (SANDCamp). It was really fun driving there, as I had never been south of San Louis Obispo before. My roommate Alicia and I got into the minivan along with the cooler on Thursday night and drove down to SLO (San Louis Obispo for the uninitiated) and then Friday morning made the drive to San Diego. We were in San Diego the whole day Saturday, and then Sunday made the ~9 hour trip back to San Francisco. Along the way we stopped at Kynsi winery in Arroyo Grande and did a flight, upon which I joined their wine club. Amazing Pinots.

Let me cut to the chase and give you the video. But keep reading to learn more about the goals of this presentation and the awesome time I had at SANDCamp:

I spent a lot of Saturday with Jen Lampton and Angie Byron talking about the upcoming usability study. It was at Panera that we hashed out the general plan to have 2 groups of users: one group using vanilla D7 so we could test their conceptual understanding of Drupal, and a second group using D7 with some contrib modules preinstalled so we could test specific interfaces (especially Views!). I had a great time with both of them, as well as all the awesome Drupal people I met throughout the day.

The presentation was called “User Experience for You and Drupal too!” and I co-presented with Jen. The goals of the presentation were to talk about user experience in general and specific to the Drupal community.

During my portion, I explained what we mean when we say “user experience” and I went over some fundamental principles of UX applicable to web design. I also talked about super low-cost methods of gaining feedback through usability studies to improve your websites. To drive the message home, I went through 2 examples of how a poor user experience can infuriate your customers. Jen brought it all back to Drupal by talking about what the community has done so far to improve Drupal’s user experience. She also shared that from her perspective as a Drupal trainer, Drupal is very difficult for new users to learn. We concluded our presentation by introducing the live usability study we just ran at Google.

I’m really happy we did this presentation. It’s all part of my goal to make user experience a top priority of the Drupal community. The live usability study definitely succeeded, but spreading the UX gospel at Drupal camps and meet-ups doesn’t hurt either :)