Live user journeys demo and comparison of Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla

Hagen Graf did an excellent live usability test at the unconference immediately before DrupalCon Copenhagen. He's a a tech writer well versed in all three of Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal, so he was able to draw out the strength and weaknesses of getting started with each platform.

Below is a cleanup of the notes I took during the live demo. Sorry they're a bit scrappy and not very even in tone! They're not perfect, but I think what Hagen did serves as an interesting demonstration of how, while no one CMS gets everything right for the prospective new user, we can fairly easily examine Drupal in the context of a non-expert's voyage of discovery, and highlight a lot of basic usability stumbling blocks on the way.

Why should this matter?

You can pick and choose your metrics, but Hagen showed us Google trends for the three CMSes. Drupal and Joomla have had a gentle downturn, while W is pretty much flatlined. Why that's happening nobody knows, but it's worth worrying about usability if there are obvious low-hanging fruit. I think: Hagen was pretty cagey about what goal we were trying to achieve!

Which should the user choose?

He started off by showing a handful of sites in quick succession, and invited us to work out which was using which CMS. Katy Perry, Atlantic Southeast Airlines, Schweizer Illustrierte... It was hard to tell. Someone shouted out "if you showed me the HTML source I could tell you!" but there wasn't a lot between the sites to make a user pick any framework on the basis of their stumbling across any of them.

Obtaining the CMS

He then followed the journey of an imaginary user to the three promotional websites for each framework. Wordpress and Joomla had clear ways of funnelling the curious visitor into "showcasing" sections, which show off the best that each framework has to offer. In comparison there was no obvious showcasing for Drupal.

He moved on to trying to download Drupal, and very quickly got lost in the list of thousands of modules. This all seemed pretty scary from the user's perspective.

Side note: SAAS

Wordpress has really easy-to-find software services on wordpress.com. Drupal's is somewhat harder for the new visitor to find, on drupalgardens.com . Joomla has no equivalent offering.

A major task

The rest of the demo was of a specific user journey on all three:

• Install the system and get into the admin interface
• Create content and upload an image associated with it
• Have the content look OK

Installation

Joomla

Smooth installation, will even create db if the user you give it has permissions. A slight glitch in usability: you have to remove an "installation directory." What does that mean? It also provides some sample data.

Wordpress

Briefly unfriendly. it won't create db for you, and will explode instead. If you now go and create it, what now? There's no back button. When you're done, you start automatically with a sample blogpost and page.

Drupal

Well, I don't know what an install profile is, so whatever. Click default. I can... add several databases? Whatever. But: if the database doesn't exist, there's a big, ugly kaboom. With no obvious explanation. When you're done no sample content, but D7 does give you quick routes to add content.

Create content

Interface to the nuts and bolts

Hagen made the point that if the client wants the image floated, you can't really do that without starting to edit the templates: which you can't do in the browser. Wordpress lets you do that in the browser. Is that the right thing to do? Well, that's a long debate. But does the end user care? Will end users choose Wordpress because it does the "wrong thing"?

In Drupal 7, it's possible to install modules through the interface, even via URL. But when you try to do something like e.g. the WYSIWYG module - how do you get the third party editor? Answer: you can't. You have to go back to the filesystem, or back to FTP.

Wordpress plugins are all really nice e.g. upgrade akismet, or find new plugins... Joomla has this massive confusion of modules, plugins and components, and is just not there.

How can we improve Drupal to get this audience?

Hagen said (I paraphrase): "Agencies don't always know how to incrementally improve a site. They change incrementally but they're not improving it. Six months later it's a mess. We need a core like Wordpress. It just works. Too many agencies and products and programming. If you come from the outside you think, wow, it's like Java!"

Someone started telling him: "But if you extend..." He replied that: "Well, everything can be solved with ten modules and some tweaking and some code... But that's not the same as audience-ready. Joomla templates are strongly MVC, so customizing is easier. But Joomla has no clear competitor for views. Wordpress has fields on a per-article basis, and you can combine that with a plugin. Field-to-field dependence in Drupal is possible but hard. Not necessarily hard for a developer to program, but hard for a user to set up.

Conclusion

Hagen tried to make us see Drupal's installation procedure (alongside that of two "competitors") through a fresh pair of eyes. We're too close to Drupal to see all of its flaws, but I think this was pretty illuminating.

Generally Drupal's zero-to-image startup is less fun than you'd think, if you don't know your way around. There are lots of configuration options, but it can be frustrating to find. It's certainly not "media-ready" out of the box. The only solution to this is more user testing, more critical examination of the process, and more willingness to learn from our competitors and willingness to fix things even when the bug actually "worksforme". By examining what other CMSes do then we should be able to make Drupal's user experience the best of all of them.