Tomorrow will be the fifth DrupalJam in the Netherlands. This time hosted in Utrecht and packed with sessions, presentations and workshops in three different areas (it’s beginning to look like a mini-drupalcon!).
If you are interested in Drupal, drop by! It’s a great way to get a feeling for the community. It’s free and you can sign up on the website.
Maybe we’ll see you there or else follow me on Twitter for some live pictures/updates. You can expect a blog post about the event next week!
So you built a super-easy-user-friendly website for community members. But despite all your efforts to make everything go as smooth as possible there is still one thing which remains a bump in the road: logging in. Of course you offer a ‘remember me‘ checkbox and hope your users will let the browser remember the password, but there always will remain a group of users who doesn’t use that option, or login on a different computer and… forget their login credentials.
If they use the ‘reminder’ option to receive a new password, chances are high they’ll leave your website if they don’t receive the email within 15 seconds. Maybe they wanted to leave a clever comment on a content notification they got, maybe they wanted to place an order. You’ll never know.
Some websites choose to avoid this issue by providing a direct login link through email. See the the example below from Hyves (a facebook-like community very popular in the Netherlands). You can login using a link with a unique variable which allows you to login (probably just once and in a certain timeframe).
Hyves (Dutch Facebook) generates a new login link on some emails
While this might be bad practice and a potentially unsafe/security issue, I think it is user friendly.
Drupal only provides a direct login link when you reset your password into a randomly generated new one. There aren’t any modules which would provide this functionality (well there is something remotely like it and also this issue) which doesn’t surprise since it isn’t “the Drupal way”. But still, for sake of argument, it could be a usability improvement.
OpenID
At least until OpenID becomes mainstream, which will probably take another decade. But then again things might starting moving fast when popular community website become OpenID providers. When sites like Facebook and Hyves become OpenID providers, people kan login on every other site which supports OpenID using those accounts. Which is a good thing.
Related:
Big cheers to the folks at developmentseed and especially Young Hahn for creating this amazing admin module which drastically improves the usability of the Drupal backend. This is, in fact, a module and includes a admin menu, contextual administration links and an admin theme. It’s a very nice preview on how Drupal’s 7 backend might look like based on work done in the usability group and d7ux.org.
At this time, the module still is at alpha stage, but new versions come along very quickly. It already looks and feels very professional and responses on Twitter on the new module are very positive. Still, if you need an alternative to improve your user experience in the admin area, you might look at Rootcandy (theme).
In other usability news, one of our team members, Maarten, is contributing in some projects on D7UX. You can view some of his usability improvements proposals here on Flickr. The complete pool of usabilty improvements can be found in the Drupal Redesign group on Flickr.
Recent posts related to Drupal usability:
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