Jennifer Lea Lampton

This February we led a Drupal 7 usability study at Google and livestreamed it to over 115 developers. Usability studies provide a firsthand look at how users experience a product and are incredibly effective at highlighting interface flaws and confusions. However, the impact these studies have are limited by their audience; it is only those present during the study who really feel engaged with it. After the analysis and recorded videos have been released, the thrill of the discussion and collaborative brainstorming has already died down. When you open up usability studies to the world, you have the power to stir an army of people into action. Everyone watches the same users getting frustrated, everyone feels the same pain at interface quirks, and everyone participates in the discussion, and ultimately the solution. We believe that live usability studies are the best way to advocate for a focus on user experience in Drupal development. In this talk, we will explain how we ran this study, key insights we gained from it, and how to do it again.

This is a repeat of the core conversation given at DrupalCon Denver, video from that session is available here: http://www.jenlampton.com/presentations/user-experience-open-source-how-...