Usability Team

It is saturday the 14th of november. Almost everyone has arrived at the castle in Behringen at around 2-3 o'clock in the afternoon. The castle is barrierfree, which means it is all adopted for disabled people. Although we are not working on accessibility I can safely assume most of the attendants support that. The castle itself is situated in a really nice rural environment. The air is really fresh. A welcome change for city dwellers. The whole castle is for the team this week. The network team, that rapidly volunteered, set up the whole wireless environment in a few hours. Punkt.de provided the switches they also use for the TYPO3 conferences. Joey brought a monster PC where he virtualised five servers. One for every team. Supportive tools like SVN, IRC and alike where all set up on this machine with the help of various people. Jens welcomed the attendants a little later in the afternoon and split up the available rooms among the attendants. After that the composition of the different teams was announced.

1. Team 1: Patrick Lobacher (Manager), Jens Hoffmann (Designer), Thomas Hempel (Core Developer), Jo Hasenau (Developer), Timo Schmidt (Developer), Michael Klapper (Developer)
2. Team 2: Ben van‘t Ende (Manager), Lars Zimmermann (Designer), Patrick Broens (Core Developer), Søren Madsen (Developer), Peter Beernink (Developer), Loek Hilgersom (Developer)
3. Team 3: Michael Leibenson (Manager), Andre Wartmann (Designer), Ingo Renner (Core Developer), Fabien Udriot (Developer), Thomas Allmer (Developer), Steffen Gebert (Developer)
4. Team 4: Joern Bock (Manager), Riona Kuthe (Designer), Sebastian Kurfürst (Core Developer), Stefan Galinski (Developer), Bodo Eichstädt (Developer), Susanne Moog (Developer)
5. Team 5: Andreas Kundoch (Manager), Goran Stefanovic (Designer), Benjamin Mack (Core Developer), Tim Lochmüller (Developer), Ivan Dharma Kartolo (Developer), Oliver Hader (Core Developer)

Every team has a manager and a TYPO3 core developer. All managers and core developers met early in the evening before dinner to discuss the bigger tasks. Some of them are: Improve page module, Change UI in Login Screen (Installer ErrorHandling), Extension which includes a complete TYPO3 website - could be installed within the 1-2-3 installer, Redesign all formfields to make a difference beetween formfield and buttons, Put all Icons in „Retro-Skin“ und new Icons in „4.4 Icons“, ExtJS pagetree with drag and drop etc., ExtJS-Skinning in the backend. We will also tackle a lot of smaller bugs in the forge bugtracker and will pick the most user oriented as there are also a lot of admin oriented bugs as well.

Sunday the 15th we started the actual work. Teams where informed about the big scheme and everybody took positions in their specific team rooms and got to work. Unfortunately Patrick Lobacher was taken to hospital early in the morning suffering from kidney stones. Get well soon Patrick! All of us wish you a lot of strength. We miss you!

The attendees for the User eXperience Week can be found here: http://t3uxw09.typo3.org/about/attendees/.

Focus on improvements¶

The TYPO3 User Experience Week is initiated to finish the so called "last 20% of the backend". Parts of the work to be done comprise cleanup, getting rid of inconsistencies and redundancies, realising existing visions and creating new ones. UX details that have been introduced already like i.e. grouping, shades, icons, contrast, will be finished . We will try to identify and solve more issues. Last but not least we will work on a new skin that already fits version 5.

Focus on users¶

TYPO3 has always been focused on technical aspects and scalability. Now the time has come to complete all this with usability and simplicity. This week is totally focused on pushing usability to the next level. It will be a week of collaboration. A plan will be developed that will be representative and at the end of the week the results will be presented on stage.

Focus on team spirit¶

The week is scheduled from saturday 14th until saturday the 21st of November. A group of 30 people will work together intensly for a whole week. Food and shelter will be provided. 20% of the group will be User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI) designers, 70% will be developers and we need like 10% nerd managers to guarantee some results. Each team will get a teamleader who will take care that certain goals are met in time.
Participants should have ample experience with TYPO3, programming according to latest paradigms and extJS. Nerd managers will have to have some experience like leading a company. UX/UI designers need to show some of their work in order to qualify. Teams of 5 to 6 participants will be formed that work on specific subjects. A jury will decide on who participates.

Focus on experts¶

A jury consisting of members of the HCI team, the core team and the TYPO3 association, will select the volunteers. Of course we also have a number of folks on the radar ourselves that are known to have contributed to usability and we will definitely not wait for them to volunteer. The real novelty is, that we also target designers and project managers. This gives companies a chance to also get into TYPO3 on another level than before.

Please use the forge project to add feature request or post bugs.

Those attending were:

• Jens Hoffmann – The leader of HCI and redesigner of TYPO3.org
• Michiel Roos – Release Manager of DAM, author of the fabulous nc_staticfilecache extension
• Benni Mack – Core Developer, responsible for the ajaxed pagetree, DAM developer, Release manager 4.4
• Uschi Renziehausen - Tester, Motivator
• Oli Hader - Release manager 4.3
• ben van ‘t ende – Organiser, Motivator, Member TYPO3 Steering Committee

Not attending: Patrick (preparing his FORM presentation), Steffen (playing piano in Dusseldorf). The others not attending were not at T3DD09 at all.

The importance of the User Experience was elevated by the fact that Jens Hoffmann was added as core developer for TYPO3 Version5. During the core meeting that preceded the actual developer days it was decided that all changes that affect the interface will have to be approved by our team by means of the "+" mechanism. At least 2 of the members of the team will have to approve of the change. Lucky for the team Benni Mack was assigned the honorable task of Release Manager for TYPO3 version 4.4. During the meeting we discussed these fortunate events. Uschi mentioned a number of problems there are with the backend. It is mainly that the colors in the backend have low contrast. The layout also has some things that need to be improved. Basically it comes down to the fact many things are hardcoded in the backend. Benni mentions that fixing one backgroundcolor for instance in the list module means all other modules need to be investigated as well. Ways of coding the different modules varies, which only makes this task more difficult. The discussion in the team got pretty heated. Jens very clearly stated that we need to act according to a global vision and not randomly fix things. The whole team definitely recognized that this makes sense. We also agreed we are not going to fix things ourselves or commit patches. All technical work is for the core team. We as a team can only indicate where the problems are and maybe suggest a solution.!>http://photos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v3859/60/108/1303566977/n1303566977_420038_3796361.jpg!

The team wants to be more visible. For that we decided to make better use of the Forge project pages we have and which is directly accessible from the homepage of http://forge.typo3.org. This article for one is an example of improving communication ;-) We also decided to meet again to discuss and decide upon the road we are travelling. The meeting will take place from 26th of june to 28th of june in Frankfurt, home of DKD.

Jens plans a User Experience Week where projectmanagers, developers and designers work together intensively for a whole week to tackle usability and layout issues. The volunteers will need to be sponsored by companies. The location, food and drinks also need sponsoring. The week is planned from the 14th to the 21th of november.

Jens and myself also discussed if the name UX/UI would be a good name for the group. We are thinking usability would be better. We have not decided on that. What do you think?

Those attending were:

• Jens Hoffmann – The leader of HCI and redesigner of TYPO3.org
• Michiel Roos – Release Manager of DAM, author of the fabulous nc_staticfilecache extension
• Steffen Kamper – The musician and TYPO3 coder
• Patrick Broens – Core developer, author of pb_survey and docheader specialist
• Benni Mack – Core Developer, HCI Co-Leader, responsible for the ajaxed pagetree, DAM developer
• ben van ‘t ende – Organiser, Motivator, Content Rendering Group
• Daan, Suze, Sam – ben’s kids @ parallel session checking out usable games

Special thanks goes out to Willem Genevace who provided the team with a community contribution by means of a barbeque featuring Forellen (Trouts).!>http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3156/2524283466_bf92de00fc_d.jpg!

The team is using TYPO3 Forge [http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/hci] as its communication platform. It features a bugtracker, WIKI, news and several other features (check out the “Also available in: PDF” option!). It is built in Red Mine [http://www.redmine.org/]. The members of the team are seasoned usability experts and dedicated to the goal of bringing usability to the backend. Less is more!

On friday we had a preliminary session deciding what we were going to do. Saturday for bugfixing and Sunday for t3skin. As it turned out we did not have any time for fixing stuff for t3skin. One thing that is picked up by Michiel are the stylesheets styling the backend. There are about 60 of them loaded on every request. Aim of this is to have a unified stylesheet that only needs to be loaded once. That would be a huge speed improvement. Initial test I have seen lower access times to the backend 50%. Michiel has written an extensive document about backend and frontend responsiveness that will be published on TYPO3.org.

Friday evening featured an Indian Foodfest provided by Lydia. Almost all Netcreators were present. Food was spicy and perfect.

On saturday morning Steffen also arrived and we discussed Jens’s PDF, now called the “evil PDF”. Every issue in there got assigned to someone in the team and was added to the HCI bugtracker on Forge. This already took like more than 2 hours. After that it was bugfixing. Of course issues assigned 10 minutes of work turned out to be more like an hour. Well that is the way things go. We worked until about 20.00.

Saturday evening featured Willem’s BBQ with “geile Forellen”. We discussed many remaining issues and the state of the TYPO3 community.

Sunday was bugfixing again. 10 out of 30 bugs were solved this weekend. [http://forge.typo3.org/reports/issue_report/hci] Benni got assigned with a special mission to check out how Kasper originally implemented top-apps (the apps in the top navigation).

We concluded our session in the just opened restaurant Goed where we had some nice burnt pizzas. The rest of the issues will be dealt with the coming weeks. For a next meeting we definitely need more time. A similar meeting to this one is already planned for DAM, featuring almost the same guys.

What remains is to mention the “ugly PDF” by Uschi Renziehausen. Check out http://forge.typo3.org/projects/hci/documents for this. Do not be shy to participate. If you have any issues just add them to our project page.

The future vision of HCI is to have the backend fully templated. It is the preference of HCI to use Smarty for that as proven technology. For one of the coming releases, maybe like TYPO3 4.5, we would like to have a totally different backend that is more usable and that looks more sexy. Consensus is that we should not stay behind the current state of webbased applications.