Utrecht UX Sprint, recap of day 1

Everybody seemed to have read and understood most of the briefing email and sprint website because there we were, 20+ Drupal peeps showing up at the lovely OneShoe office, on time.

As expected we took an hour or so getting settled, finding team mates, asking for wifi passwords etc. Bojhan ran us through the plan for today and then the teams sat together and started attacking their issues.

Around one hour in we got our first tiny patch committed by Dries. Always good for morale.

Damien, Gabor, Konstantin, Steve and Thijs had a room on their own. Paving the way for Form Builder to land in core as our Fields UI. As far as I understood this involved lots of making and breaking stuff. But, the D7 port of the form builder module is there and landing jQuery UI seems not too far away as well jQuery UI has landed. It's just great to have these guys in the same room and see how focussed they are in their approach. Excellent.

Marieke, Thomas, Berend and Willem worked on text improvements. Another great way to find out about Drupal functionality weirdness, even when you are a long time insider. Bojhan and I reviewed their work after lunch, mostly stressing the 'make it even shorter' point. Among others, the shorter content type descriptions got committed, changing them from lengthty paragraphs into shorter yet more helpful sentences. Also, fresh beginnings of a text style guide for the Drupal interface

Together with Leisa, Mark and Nasir we discussed the modules page. Yep, one of the bigger issues. As per usual, we needed to talk about two hours to get to the point where we could agree we were agreeing on the same things (mostly!). Leisa took that talking and worked on mockups and followup questions. Can we all agree that modules are weird things? Between adding just a single checkbox somewhere and installing something like Ubercart… It's nearly impossible to find an approach that works equally well for all scenarios. I do think we found ways to improve the page, even incrementally. We'll recap tomorrow and keep you posted.

More good stuff worked on for blocks, menus and taxonomies as well, we'll talk about these another time, ok?

All in all, a very productive day. Looking forward to the over-night reviews from over-seas.