Mark Boulton Design

Drupal is an open source content management platform with an active and passionate community of nearly half a million users. We were hired to redesign Drupal's home on the web; Drupal.org.

An Open Design Process

Open Source thrives, and in fact survives, on the collective wisdom of thousands of contributors. All talking; all giving; all working towards the same goal. Working closely with User Experience Consultant, Leisa Reichelt, it became clear very early on this project that we shouldn't approach it like we do most other projects. We were in a unique position. The project almost required us to work openly - for all to see - in order to gain trust from the community and other intended target audiences.

Being All Ears

In order to engage with and gather feedback from the community we used new methods of design research including uploading wireframes to Flickr, setting up a redesign group on Twitter, blogging about the process, face to face user testing, and card sort tasks. This distributed approach ensured we not only designed for the community, but also other important audience groups. Throughout the redesign we encouraged the community to submit their own wireframes, Information Architecture ideas and comments on our own take on designs for the wordmark and site itself.

Iteration, Iteration

We adopted an iterative approach using prototypes across the four month process. Each week we released a new iteration and posted on groups.drupal.org asking for thoughts from the community. The project mantra - especially early on - was 'Fail Fast. Publicly.' We wanted to know quickly and openly if we were on the right track.

All feedback was taken onboard and considered and we fed this into the following week’s iteration. The final iteration, iteration 11, saw improved navigation, aesthetics, and copy, all based on months of testing, research and feedback. All this was delivered in a brand and editorial style guide to ensure future consistency in style for Drupal.org.

Responsibilities: Information Architecture, User Testing, Prototyping, Design, Art Direction, and Copywriting.