It has taken me about 4 years to transition from a focus on UI design and development for desktop applications to a focus on web applications. The last 3 years have been almost entirely spent on learning the ins and outs of building web sites on the Drupal platform. During that time I've taken note of where I see aspects of the internal architecture impacting on my ability to carry out user experience design as precisely as I would like.

To capture some of these kinds of thoughts, I've created a new section under TUAG Articles called 'Core'. I called it 'Core' because I needed a place to put certain foundational ideas upon which I build my strategies for UX and systems design. Having these core ideas in one place will allow me to reference them in future articles.

Over the next few months I intend to share some ideas about various deep UX issues that I see within Drupal. By 'deep UX issues' I mean strategic matters that stem from architectural causes rather than questions of tactics or style.

I intend to organize these core articles into groups because they generally require more than just a single post to develop the overall problem identification and description of possible solutions.

The first section, called 'Users, Roles and Narratives', deals with an issue that I consider to be of fundamental importance for any user interface system and applies particularly to Drupal. The issue is that of defining and managing what I call the 'User Narrative'. A User Narrative is basically the story that is told to a user, either implicitly or explicitly, within a given user interface. I believe this story aspect holds the potential to carry much of the burden of usability fulfillment in any user interface system – but especially so with web applications.

The thrust of this initial group of articles is to make a case for greater control of user-facing text (or strings) in order to permit a systematic means of designing and implementing intentional (rather than accidental) User Narratives. I begin this section with an overview of the importance of Role oriented UX design.

This first section is still incomplete at the moment. I plan to add 2 more chapters in the near future. The articles are a little bit technical and a little bit design-ish. They're a bit serious and a bit playful. I think we need this kind of mix when we engage in creative problem solving.

I believe the articles raise some useful questions and present a frame of reference touches simultaneously on design and development issues. I think this line of discussion could help Drupal developers and UX designers find some new strategies for tackling a variety of usability challenges.

Here are the articles: 'Users, Roles and Narratives'