Drupal, D7UX, and the 80% minority.

I started writing a comment for this great post Then I thought there are enough comments in there already so I'd rather write my own post.

And also because this is kind of a mission statement about the question: How would you define success for the Drupal project?

The best summary of what happened this last year with Drupal is Leisa Reichelt's blog post: Designing for the wrong target audience (or why Drupal should be a developer tool and not a consumer product), which is a very well written and balanced one.

They say 'We designed for the wrong target audience'. Still that was, or intended to be, '80% of Drupal users', which by any means would be a good target audience to choose. Other people, including Dries say 'The D7UX improvements benefit a ton of people'. And I think all of them are right.

Does it make sense that we are not happy with UI improvements, designed with 80% of Drupal users in mind, that benefited a ton of people?

Yes, it does. But maybe because they are the 'wrong' ton of people. I can guess there's that 80% of users that just download Drupal and set up their blog.

But there's the other 20% that are the ones that build bigger and greater web sites, and guess what: they are the ones that work hard every day to make Drupal. So this was mostly an example of a badly targeted effort on which we were asking the 20% to forget their needs and work for the other 80%. No surprise it didn't really work out.

At the end this comes down to two different ideas of 'success'. For some people success is 'more people using Drupal to build their sites' (more smaller sites). While for some others it is 'building greater things, which may be sites or products with Drupal' (better bigger sites).

I'd say success is 'More people using sites built with Drupal'

And success is also 'More people being able to make a living out of Drupal'

And just in case, here's one for failure too. Failure isn't 'Not achieving your goals'. Failure is 'Not achieving your goals and not learning anything in the process'.

Drupal

Comments

Thu, 29/10/2009 - 13:32 — mortendk (not verified)

spot on!

Thu, 29/10/2009 - 16:39 — Aphid (not verified)

Drupal, as happens with many

Drupal, as happens with many open source, user-maintained projects, has eventually - and literally - grow out of the idea that the most important users of it are the ones who contribute back to it.

Firefox grew out of that idea, Linux has more or less grown out of it. The most important users are people who find that Drupal makes building sites better, and people who find visiting them more enjoyable.

Just to keep the 'growing out' of things metaphor going - a sign of a mature project is when the number of non-contributing users greatly outweighs the cohort of code contributors.

Products should not be made for their manufacturers.

Thu, 29/10/2009 - 17:11 — Jose

Thanks for your comment, very

Thanks for your comment, very good perspective.

However the point here is who are Drupal (core) users? And I think they are mostly people building other things with Drupal. And if in doubt, and we have to make a choice, they should be the people who build it, just because they work on that to use it on their own projects.

In your examples... Linux... not really. But maybe Ubuntu or RedHat did, right?

We are at the same position right now, think of Drupal as the core Acquia or Open Atrium are built upon. What would happen if Linux developers (understanding Linux as the core OS it is) would need to start worrying about developing this browser or that mp3 music player? Where would that leave RedHat, Suse, or others?

So we are at the point now where we need to make the choice to grow up, and define what we are building and for whom. Are we Linux or are we Ubuntu? The answer so far is we are both, but that cannot be.

Thu, 29/10/2009 - 17:44 — Aphid (not verified)

That's a very interesting

That's a very interesting response, thanks Jose.

I should have said 'Ubuntu' when I said Linux, which would have made my position more clear.

Right now you're right - most of the serious users of Drupal are also contributing to the project. And I have been silently thanking them and cursing them ever since I visited drupal.org (mainly thanking them).

I'd like to see a lot more people building sites with Drupal, and to see Drupal evolving to suit them by becoming easier to work with and more readily able to make sites that a pleasure to look at and to use. 'Success, as I would define it, would entail many more people working with Drupal than are working on it.

I totally agree that this seems to be a pivotal moment in Drupal's young history, and it's pretty obvious that my own preference is that it becomes more like 'firefox' or 'ubuntu' in its commitment to users who are not coders.

The 'measures of success' that you suggested in your initial post were excellent. Yet I'm sure most of us - I'm just building my 3rd Drupal site, so very new to it still - feel good when we see Dries announce that the Whitehouse, a major record label, or the Economist is on the same platform without really minding too much whether or not those specific projects have contributed yet another field type for CCK.

Your reframing of the question as being between 'linux' or 'ubuntu' is very interesting and I think it captures precisely how different factions on each side have grown within the Drupal community. If we have to choose something, I'd like us to become Firefox.

Sun, 15/11/2009 - 20:00 — R.J. Steinert (not verified)

Manufacturer's 'Employees' have a choice

"Products should not be made for their manufacturers."

While this might hold up in neoclassical economic theory, this not true for developing open source software. If there aren't some major improvements in Drupal to make it a better framwork to develop on, the 'manufacturer's employees' are going to just get right up and leave. Many have already left in favor of other developer friendly frameworks such as Rails and Django. Without the factory workers, no product.

Fri, 30/10/2009 - 01:30 — Robert Castelo (not verified)

Developer Motivation

Good point Jose - motivation of developers was something that was not much discussed as part of the D7UX project. Drupal is great not because developers were told what to do, but because they had great ideas and were passionate about realising them.

If we replace passion with metrics we are aiming towards an OK product, rather than a great one.

Lun, 02/11/2009 - 11:48 — dman (not verified)

Insight

Interesting insight. I've been mainly well clear of the 'debate' that's been going on in the blogs, but I like what you've identified here - picking the wrong target audience.

It's like if the city planners decided that their first priority was to make householders happy. After all, the populous are allegedly the lifeblood, the constituency, and the majority of a city.

Are the thousands of people that turn on a tap more important that the dozen people that lay the drains? Who should you consult when deciding to lay a new pipe?
When placing a new bus lane, should you give greater importance to the passengers or the bus driver?

A city planners job is to make decisions that make sense and help the engineers, the road builders, the local police, the schools and to build things that the city planners and engineers that come after them can build from.
In a well-maintained city, the people are happy because it's a good city, and population will never be a problem. But that's a result of deciding to build a good city - not of deciding to make individuals, or even the 'majority' of people "happy".
Such cities are built by ... people that build cities. Not by the people that just live in them.

It's the Drupal developers we need to keep happy and keep working. Oi polloi will follow.

... that said, I don't see many decisions in Drupal core that I'm unhappy with or would regard as a bad compromise. ... but too many words have definitely been spilt in the discussions.