UX

I recently sat down (over Zoom) with our UX lead Annika Oeser, who walked me through a typical UX workshop like the ones we usually conduct with our agency clients.

When someone comes to your website with an information need, they have two options: they can either use the site’s navigation to get where they need to go, or they can use the search function. We’re going to focus on the latter for this article.

Many of us do dozens or even hundreds of searches per day without even thinking about it: searching for an email, searching for that song on Spotify, figuring out what to make for dinner, looking up a contact on your phone, finding a word on this page. 

We just expect search to work—but that’s easier said than done.

We look at some real-life examples of health information website UX and define 5 essential design guidelines for getting crucial healthcare content to the right audience.

University websites are notoriously complex. Some of our higher ed clients manage literally hundreds of sites that mirror their institutions’ numerous faculties, campuses, services and audiences.

Designing a good user experience with these unique constraints is no easy task, and it seems like a lot of schools have issues with things like prioritizing their website’s content.

Case in point — I recently stumbled across a tweet that made me do a double-take:

Now that the year is nearing its end, I have the chance to reflect on what I learned about UX design this year, and want to share some highlights from a conference I attended last month.
 

The Layout Builder is one of the most exciting new features in Drupal 8. It's a site building tool that makes it easier to configure how your content is displayed in Drupal. You can use a drag-and-drop interface to combine fields, nodes, and other content, and actually control the layout used to contain that content.

It’s a new year, and one of your resolutions might be keeping a more minimalist lifestyle. A few years ago, I read Marie Kondo’s book about the benefits and practice of keeping things tidy. And it planted a seed in my mind about how this applies to content. And in particular, your content strategy. How can we apply the same techniques that result in a well-organized drawers and closets to well-organized content hierarchy and navigation? How can they guide your next content audit?

I’ve recently been researching, writing, and talking about content editor experience in Drupal 8. However, in the back of my mind I’ve been reflecting on the site builder experience. Every developer, site builder, themer who learns Drupal is going to try out the admin UI to get their site up-and-running. What are some things site builders often struggle with in the admin UI when learning Drupal?

The administrative interface for Drupal is notoriously intimidating for content editors who are new to the platform. I do a lot of training for Drupal content editors and administrators and have witnessed this first-hand.

In the coming months on our blog, I’ll be interviewing some of the members of our team at Evolving Web to give you some insight into how they work, their perspective and their field of expertise.