Let's focus on the experience of all users with Drupal. The visitors and users of your sites are important, but what about the experience of the Drupal site administrators? The community is also getting involved for them.
User experience (UX) “describes the overall experience felt by the user when using an interface, a digital device, or more broadly when interacting with any device or service”*. UX is therefore complex, but it is essential to consider to meet users’ expectations. In this post, we’ll see that Drupal 8 has relevant modules for designing a good experience on your websites.
And that’s not all! The strength of Drupal also lies in its community, which is constantly proposing new ways to improve the platform. Thanks to this community, the experience of CMS administrators isn’t left behind.
Drupal for designing a great user experience
Designing a good user experience on your site is essential to ensure user satisfaction, lower your bounce rate, and increase your conversion rate. To achieve this, a good UX Design methodology is necessary, but the choice of CMS is also important for implementing the results of this approach. As far as we are concerned, we prioritize Drupal because it turns out to be a powerful CMS, mainly thanks to the quantity and quality of its modules. In practical terms, whatever you want to do on your site, there’s probably a module to meet your needs. To give you some examples, here are 5 areas where Drupal 8 can help optimize your site’s user experience.
Facilitating Responsive Design
The proliferation of screen sizes has become an important factor to consider when designing a website. It is crucial that websites adapt to all screen sizes. This is even truer now that users easily access the internet via their mobile phones. A good user experience therefore means a site that can be viewed on any device. Drupal 8 and its modules help easily create responsive websites.
Personalizing the website
To offer an even better user experience, it is recommended to personalize site content based on the user, so that they have access only to the elements that interest them. Drupal 8 helps with this personalization through the Acquia Lift Connector module, which integrates with the Acquia Lift service, allowing content to be configured based on the user’s demographic data, the time and date of the user’s login, their gender, or device, for example.
Optimizing site performance
Page load time has a huge impact on user experience. According to some sources, after three seconds of page loading, 40% of visitors will leave your website*. Having a fast-loading site therefore significantly reduces user frustration and bounce rate. The advantage of Drupal 8 is that it is one of the most efficient CMSs for optimizing page processing speed. It also allows you to configure caching using modules like Internal page cache, Dynamic page cache, BigPipe, Redis, Varnish, Memcache API and Integration. Finally, it also helps optimize images for better performance.
Getting a multilingual site
“Drupal 8 core is equipped with multilingual capabilities. It allows you to translate content, site interfaces, language, and default configuration. For example, you can translate your website content into a particular language depending on the user’s geographic location”*.
Integrating social media
Drupal 8 and its modules such as Easy Social or OneAll Social allow users to log in to the site using their existing social network accounts, integrate social media into your site, or create sharing buttons. These elements improve user experience by, for example, making it easier to log in. They are also useful because they allow users to share their experience with your site on social networks.
Drupal therefore makes it easier to design a good user experience on your site, but it goes even further by aiming to offer the best possible user experience for Drupal administrators!
And what about the Drupal administrator experience?
User experience doesn’t only concern the users of sites built with Drupal; it also concerns CMS users. Drupal allows you to do a lot, but in return, it is known for being difficult to understand/learn. The user experience for Drupal administrators is therefore sometimes average—even poor—for new users. Fortunately, another major strength of Drupal lies in its community, which helps improve the CMS not only in terms of functionality but also usability.
To illustrate the role of the Drupal community, let’s look at a case study showing how a working group of Drupal users initiated a UX Design approach to improve the CMS for content editors.
The Drupal UX study
This study group (called Admin UX User) aimed to conduct research with Drupal users and propose improvements to the content editors’ user experience. In 2018, the group undertook a real UX approach to contribute to these improvements. The first step was to conduct a survey on how content editors use Drupal, as well as the problems and difficulties they encounter. They managed to collect 260 questionnaire responses on positive and negative points when using Drupal.
The answers obtained
According to the responses, the aspects of Drupal that are appreciated are its flexibility and customization offered by the CMS, which allow editors to control their content.
Paradoxically, these qualities were also considered as making the interface complex and difficult to use. “Content editors specifically mentioned that the user interface provided by paragraphs and panels adds a lot of complexity”*. Other issues were also raised, such as difficulty finding documentation, working with media, and understanding the technical jargon and terminology. Some also indicated that adding content translation made the interface even more complicated.
Finally, participants were asked to suggest improvements they would like to see on the platform. The main improvement mentioned was to have a more modern user interface. Content editors also wanted a better experience when using the content listing page, the content editing page, and the tools available on those pages. They also suggested better media management, improvements to the WYSIWYG editor, and more configuration options based on content editors’ roles.
Reflections on these responses
Following these results, the working group considered possible solutions to resolve the reported issues. Regarding the implementation of a more modern interface, another working group (Drupal Admin UI) had already begun seeking improvements.
The group’s other reflections led to a finding: many of the problems mentioned by survey participants could be solved with default Drupal configuration changes for a dedicated content editor role. The group also pointed out that no participant mentioned the need to redesign the information architecture by reorganizing administration menu items.
Finally, the research revealed that many content editors also perform site-building and advanced administration tasks. This means that the personas (typical user profiles) such as site builders, content editors, and developers are probably too rigid.
Next steps
Configuration changes such as reducing permissions for editors, granting access to an admin menu with a limited set of options, and customizing some default widget settings have been planned.
To conclude, the study group needs to carry out user testing to gather more information about the aspects users appreciate and what can be applied to Drupal for further improvement. A card sort is also planned to generate suggestions on how to organize the information architecture of the admin user interface to make it more content editor-centered.
To be continued…
Conclusion
Drupal is therefore a powerful CMS, but one that also strives to improve continually to offer the best possible experience for administrators. Drupal will continue to evolve with a passionate community. Improving UX for all users seems assured.
Sources :
https://opensenselabs.com/blog/articles/drupal-user-experience
https://lacliniquewp.com/vitesse-de-chargement-site-wordpress/
https://evolvingweb.ca/blog/drupal-admin-ux-study-survey-results
https://www.usabilis.com/definition-ux-experience-utilisateur-user-experience/
Alexandre PONS - UX Designer
