Making Drupal easy for the people who use it most: your site editors

1. Admin Experience
Making Drupal easy for
the people who use it most

2. DRUPAL HAS A REPUTATION OF BEING
Harder to Learn
We have the power to make it
easier. What follow are some
ideas on how site builders and
developers can help
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

3. Appropriate Complexity
● Have roles configured with a simplified
editor experience, for less technical users
● Balance power and configurability with
simplified, single-purpose tasks
● The right answer will be different from site
to site, and change over time
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

4. Design for the Typical Use Case
● If an entity has numerous fields to handle
edge cases, collapse them into a tab or
fieldset
● If various WYSIWYG plugins are needed for
edge cases, put them into a separate text
format, not default
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

5. Consistency
● Try to have edit forms follow the same
structure as the entity view
● Try to use the same widgets and naming
across different entities and bundles
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

6. Keeping Context
● Allow management within a
logical system
● Provide obvious prompts for
editors only
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

7. Keep Page Loads Useful
● Redirect on login or show useful information
● Use the destination parameter to take users
somewhere useful after a task is completed
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

8. Jakob’s Law
● Leverage conventions and
mental models editors bring
to your site
● Mimic the way similar
applications work whenever
possible
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars
Users spend most of their time
on other sites. This means that
users prefer your site to work
the same way as all the other
sites they already know.

9. Watch Your Language
● Minimize the use of Drupalisms as much
as possible
○ Nodes, entities, media, etc
● Try to use familiar, relevant, and
meaningful labels
○ Alerts, events, images, etc
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

10. Don’t Make Me Think
● Make it obvious how to perform a task
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

11. Rinse and Repeat
● Get feedback and iterate
Photo:
https://unsplash.com/@brucemars

12. Thank you.