A Better Backend
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.
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