Usability in Drupal 7 - New Administration Menu

Tim Millwood's wrote a post titled "Me, Drupal 7 and it's competition", where he mentions he will be joining Mark Boulton Design, the firm hired to redesign Drupal.org and improve usability in Drupal 7. Tim refers to research into the user dashboards he has done into Wordpress and Joomla, which are pretty highly regarded for their usability, as a way assess where Drupal fits into the larger open source CMS ecosystem. I think the most important observation he makes is that Drupal can really benefit from a User Dashboard.  

The thing I was most pleased to hear at Drupalcon last week was that the community recognizes usability is a huge barrier to entry with the system. Drupal is not a hard system to use to create and edit content. But, what I think draws people into other systems is the feeling of a centralized management area where someone can go to see a snapshot of what is happening on the website. 

As seen below, Wordpress 2.7 comes with a refined dashboard that gives site administrators a good view of what is going on within the site. There are blocks to show recent comments, recent posts, system updates, and so on. The navigation makes accessing administration pages quick and easy. Also, the design is very inviting to people, making it feel like the system is easy to use whether it is or not.

 Joomla also has a pretty well designed dashboard. A former colleague of mine says "people only like Joomla because the backend is bubbly", which is a very good point. The main factor that I think draws people onto using the system is that when looking at it compared to Drupal, it is more welcoming to users.

Now in looking at the backend of a Drupal installation, it is a list of links broken up into functional areas. It was designed for the sole purpose of administering the the backend of the system. There have been projects that seek to accessing administrative functions easier, such as the Administration Menu module which is installed on this site, but not that seek to create a CMS cockpit if you will, which is now a days an industry standard. 

Now dashboards like the ones seen in Wordpress and Joomla can easily be created in Drupal by creating themes specifically for the administration screen. Someone can configure blocks and panels to create a user dashboard to show all the information seen in the Wordpress dashboard or nicely designed icons as links to administrative functions like in Joomla. The problem is most people don't bother to do it.

I think if this is going to be done more often, there needs to be something like this as part of core. I propose a Dashboard and Dashboard API module. The Dashboard module would just generate a page, or panel, and a series of simple blocks that can be added or taken away (i.e. most recent database logs, most recent blog posts, who is logged in now, top users, recent comments, etc.). The Dashboard API module would allow users to create modules for custom blocks that can be added to Dashboards, like charts and graphs of recent site access, maps with density points of where your site users are. This model stays within Drupal's core philosophy of a module system that can be customized to your specific needs.

The new admin theme should seek to do a couple of things that limit usability within Drupal:

1. Seperate out functional areas into different screens or tabs as to not clutter the screen with long lists of link.
2. Give guidance to developers on how to organize admin screens for their modules. To often configuration screens end up in the wrong areas, such as URL Alias being controlled under site building when all other screens under their manipulate the theme.
3. Allow users/developers to bring forth what is most useful to them on one screen as to minimize the number of clicks to get to specific information.

I drew up a mockup of what I think this should look like. Take a look below and let me know what you think. Also, if you have images of user dashboards you have built in Drupal or mockups of how you feel the admin screen should improve, please link to them in your comments.