It’s the penultimate door of our Advent Calendar, and today we are looking at efforts to make Drupal easier and more intuitive for new users. Emma Horrell – who in addition to her User Experience Manager role the University of Edinburgh, is also UX manager for Drupal Core, and UX research lead for Drupal CMS – explains how UX research is central to Drupal CMS’s mission of flattening Drupal’s traditionally steep learning curve.
No more steep learning curve! How UX research is making a more user-centric Drupal CMS
Emma outlines how UX in Drupal has evolved from ad-hoc contributions to formalized roles and processes, and how Drupal CMS was designed from the outset as a user-centered product. By clearly defining the goals of Drupal CMS the UX team uses research to understand what “good” looks like and to align Drupal’s powerful capabilities with real user needs.
The talk then details the research approach used before and after Drupal CMS 1.0. Early research focused on understanding new audiences through archetypes, task mapping, and benchmarking. Post-release research is grouped into current state, iterative, and discovery research. Key initiatives include examining terminology through the “Drupalisms” project, validating installation and onboarding tasks, improving content creation, and content relationships, and simplifying how users extend functionality.
Finally, Emma looks ahead to discovery research shaping the future of Drupal CMS, particularly around site templates and AI. Research into site templates explored who would build them, who would use them, and how they could act as starter kits to help users launch professional sites quickly. AI research focused on understanding how context, standards, and onboarding affect trust and usability, ensuring AI features genuinely assist rather than confuse users.
Emma closes by emphasizing that Drupal CMS serves as a faster experimentation space for UX improvements that can later influence Drupal core, and she invites the community to participate in research, feedback, and ongoing UX initiatives.
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