8 Tips for Drupal Usability

Usability is not a big problem to talk a lot about it in the Drupal community. But it makes Drupal services more comfortable for users and we still try to make Drupal sites as usable as possible. Fortunately there are a lot of simply tools you can use to make your life easier.
Let’s give you some simple tips how to improve the usability of Drupal.

Build your own admin dashboard

There are a lot of experimental modules to build it. You may have Wordpress like a dashboard screen for admin. Using Panels can be very useful.

Many users don’t understand multiple select boxes

Probably most of the people know that in order to select multiple options in a select box you may use Ctrl+Click. But many people do not aware of it. They think it is rather to use checkboxes instead.

Disable all distractions which the user doesn’t need

Of course, Drupal provides a lot of useful functions but don’t give to your visitors the information which is not useful for them.

Show the results

Drupal doesn’t automatically display the number of search results. But you can add this functionality to make a big help for your visitors.

Make your node-edit screen

In order to make your node-edit screen more usable you can use Drupal 6 module. Then vertical tabs will make your node edit screen less cluttered.

Redirect visitors to the right place

You need to separate admin roles and task for administrators to send users directly to the specific page. In order to do it you can use Rules or the core trigger module. The last one has more features.

Use Diff module to see the differences are made

Diff module is pretty useful with revision option for nodes. So you can use it to see any changing is made.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy can be a little confused for some users. You may have hierarchical select steps in as an option and it could automatically control it. Also it enables selection methods through jQuery to find a lot of scalable solutions.