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DrupalCon, planes, URL's, 10% and everything

This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

We tried to get the next plane towards Amsterdam, it was fully booked. The next one was overbooked. So we got a flight to Vienna and then to Amsterdam. After checking in, going through customs again, waiting 2 hours, we found out it was cancelled. We got rerouted towards Muchen and then to Amsterdam. After 3 hours waiting the plane actually left the ground, one hour late. We missed our connection to Amsterdam and slept at an 4 star hotel nearby. Not that we enjoyed the hotel because we had to get up at 5 AM to catch the next flight. Only to find out ...

...it was cancelled. 28 hours after we left Szeged, we were at home. Most west coast Americans attending the DrupalCon were probably already in bed. It thought me however a couple of lessons. One of them I wanted to share. There was no single airline that was responsible for the chain of events or knew about it. Sabre

(the independent computer network that all airlines use) is great, they can realtime reroute any passenger over any airline towards any destination. Yet, it is not in use a trouble-ticketing system, airline B knew nothing about my history and when failing to deliver they happily transferred me to airline C. Nobody saw my complete chain of events, from A-Z.

This is a lesson I need to pickup; whenever you fail to deliver a service to a customer, try to place it in the chain of events the customer already experienced. It will not make the delivery better, but you will understand the feelings of the customer better.

Now regarding DrupalCon. Here is a small update. I really REALLY liked the conference. I talked to lots of people, attended more sessions then I planned, got active in a couple of BoF's and co-presented one with Larry and Dries. So here is a small update on stuff I found.

It is great to see that the -on the spot during DrupalCon Barcelona- made up number of 7% female is broken!

With 10% of XX chromosomes during the Con we do represent the number of females on Drupal.org versus the number of males. Sure, it should have been 50%, but as the great

By bertboerland at 05/09/2008 - 16:50 | bert | DOP.nu | drupal | english | geeks/nerds | Happy | internet culture | search-engines | bertboerland's blog | 610 reads

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URL navigation?

I am surprised you take Leisa her claim so literally, since I highly doubt her observation was concluding anything at this state. It is old news that "power" users make use of URLS to navigate.

It is interested you point out navigation by url is used just as much as the mouse is, which is contradicted by a lot of usability research. It is mostly used by expert users or the developers to navigate, who you clearly see in the community, but those who don't navigate in such a fashion you usually don't encounter easily.

Why is this a gap on the side of graphic designers, shouldn't it be coders who would match the url's to the visual navigation? I highly doubt that Leisa doesn't count this as part of usability, since it is a commonly known aspect.

On the note of black people, it seems to be a common thing. Is it possible to conclude that it is a right presentation of the population? Consider that for developers in Asia/Africa/South-America it usually is to expensive to get to these kind of conferences.

By Bojhan Somers (not verified) at Fri, 05/09/2008 - 6:04pm | login or register to post comments

Hmm

I am surprised you take Leisa her claim so literally, since I highly doubt her observation was concluding anything at this state. It is old news that "power" users make use of URLS to navigate.

It is interested you point out navigation by url is used just as much as the mouse is, which is contradicted by a lot of usability research. It is mostly used by expert users or the developers to navigate, who you clearly see in the community, but those who don't navigate in such a fashion you usually don't encounter easily.

Why is this a gap on the side of graphic designers, shouldn't it be coders who would match the url's to the visual navigation? I highly doubt that Leisa doesn't count this as part of usability, since it is a commonly known aspect.

On the note of black people, it seems to be a common thing. Is it possible to conclude that it is a right presentation of the population? Consider that for developers in Asia/Africa/South-America it usually is to expensive to get to these kind of conferences.

By Bojhan (not verified) at Fri, 05/09/2008 - 6:09pm | login or register to post comments

URL = CLI

The address bar is a command line interface. And Drupal makes it very easy to create short and clear URL's. Combined this means a Drupal site can have great navigation usability for experienced users. Nothing beats the effectiveness of a CLI, once you know the commands.

I contacted Leisa Reichelt about this. She agrees. The point she wanted to make during DrupalCon was about the drupal.org menu. She had asked and observed people navigating the site. And the reason people were using the URL was because it was impossible to find what they were looking for using the drupal.org navigation.

By gaele (not logged in) (not verified) at Fri, 05/09/2008 - 7:40pm | login or register to post comments

i agree!

hi Bert, sorry it took me a while to find this post! I did want to stop in though and confirm what gaele said - that I do completely agree with what you're saying - typing a URL (or using browser history or other browser and/or OS functionality) is very often more efficient than using a site navigation.

The point I was trying to make was really more about user observation than the actual behaviour that I observed (although, it did illustrate that the information architecture leaves a lot to be desired, as I had asked people to show me where to find the modules section on the site and most couldn't do that using the IA).

I've never seen so many people use URLs that deep into a site, and also use Google as specifically as I did watching people at Drupalcon!

Watching people use stuff gives you such a great insight into the people you're designing for - I feel like I know the Drupal crew a lot better now for having been at Drupalcon and doing some observation and interviews!

I really hope that by working closely with the Drupal community (as we're hoping to do) we can close that gap between the way that UI people and Code people see the world!

By leisa (not verified) at Sun, 07/09/2008 - 2:03am | login or register to post comments