Leisa and Mark recently blogged about crowd-sourcing usability testing. I'm really interested in this topic, in fact i spoke about it in DC. For those of you not familiar with the concept, the idea is to generate vast amounts of usage data. Consider the fact that Drupal has been tested 3 times, roughly once per year, generating approximately 24 videos of users attempting to fulfill a fraction of the tasks in Drupal core.

For the past month or so, Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been getting up to speed on Drupal and brainstorming ideas for improvement. They're now at a point where they need help from the community. They can not succeed without our participation, and thus far they're not getting the level of participation they need. At present, they immediate feedback on the following:

Approximately a year ago I helped layout out a vision for how we could add test driven development to the Drupal core development process. Here's an update on the automated testing process. Jimmy Berry and I gave a talk at Drupalcon DC.

This is the second half of a screencast series on Acquia Search. In the first screencast, I demonstrated how to enable the appropriate modules. In this screencast, I show you how to configure and use Acquia Search and Apache Solr.

Learn how to get up and running with Acquia Search and Solr.

Here's how you can determine test coverage of your tests by generating a report like this one:
http://acquia.com/files/test-results/index.html

Step 1: Install xdebug php extension. On ubuntu I run

apt-get install php5-xdebug


Step 2: Checkout simpletest trunk anywhere on your disk. In this example I will choose /usr/local/simpletest

svn co \
https://simpletest.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/simpletest/simpletest/tru... \
/usr/local/simpletest


Step 3: Add simpletest to the php.ini loaded by apache.

What if I told you I could improve your visitors experience by optimizing their ability to discover information on your site? What if I could empower your visitors to find information faster? I can do this for you! No, I'm not a magician, I'm merely running a usability study on Acquia's Search offering. There's only room for 6 (2 per session), but if you sign up now, I'll help you achieve the aforementioned goals by getting Acquia Search running on your site.

I'm tremendously excited to have Mark, Leisa and team join forces with the community and continue the user experience momemtum. Given their prior work, I truly believe they're the team to help extract us from the minutia, think big, and create an experience that expands Drupal's adoption. Welcome aboard!

As with any good design process, they'll kick this project off at Drupalcon DC by conducting research. So far, they've identified two activities:

1. Blue Sky Design Workshops

I can hardly wait to go do DrupalCon 2009 in Washington DC. If you’re as excited about DrupalCon as I am, but are having a hard time finding the money you’d need to attend, perhaps you should apply for one of the 20 scholarships that are being awarded. Anybody in financial need can apply:

Training is a huge consideration when moving to a new software platform. You have to ask yourself, how steep is the learning curve? How many people do you have to train? How many of those people are going to drag their feet? It has been my experience that no matter how much easier the new solution is, people still resist change. Sooner or later, you will have to send them off and running. For the fourth installment of my migration blog, I'm going to recommend leveraging Drupal's built in help functions as well as the Advanced Help module to make the transition smoother.