In the last few months, I have had a lot of questions about this final school year. I am now only 3 months of thesis work away, from hopefully completing my M.A. in Interaction Design at the Utrecht School of Art & Technology.

While I am obviously still very involved in a few of the major Drupal UX initiatives around mobile, layout & blocks and content creation much of my attention has been on my thesis project which has been quite exciting.

My thesis is focused on designing haptic feedback, from vibration, motion to mechanical forms. Most of my work is in researching how designers can make use of patterns (slow ticking of a vibration motor, variable resistance on a handle) in these actuators to communicate meaning.

Experiment using rotary encoder and potentiometer.

In collaboration with Jared Ponchot the UX-Team has been working on redesign of the create content screen, a page that at the center of Drupal's UX which was in desperate need of an overhaul

The primary improvements that we focused on are:

• Introducing a new grouping pattern in the form of a sidebar, to allow for easier scanning of settings and avoid the space-consuming vertical tabs.
• Placing the primary publishing options closer to the action of saving.

Drupal 8 development has been underway for some time now and we're seeing increased activity around issues that aim to improve Drupal usability.

What's been missing is an overview of where we should focus our time and energy when tackling Drupal user experience challenges. This post provides an outline of the topics we want to focus on to make Drupal 8 great.

In a nutshell, we want to:

• Kick off some essential core UX design projects in the next months.
• We will work on the content creation experience, fields UI and extending Drupal.
• And last, we want to position the default profile(s) of Drupal core, and define a community-driven framework for making decisions on their directions.

One of our biggest challenges, is that we lack developers who are involved in each of these topics. We learned, that the best way to get great developers ready and willing to contribute to UX initiatives are, is when there are well-researched, solid design proposals. So lets all start there.

After an intense Drupal 7 period, the UX Team is starting work on the exciting new UX challenges in Drupal 8.

In Drupal 7 you are now able to install modules and themes using the interface. This opens the possibility for contrib to create a browser of projects.

Quickly access configuration of blocks, menus and more. A new design pattern in Drupal 7.

I presented on my experience doing UX work in the Drupal community: the challenges and opportunities we have towards creating a more richer design community.

At Drupalcamp Stockholm I presented on Drupal 7UX. I was able to share some of the important changes, and what we have learned in the process.

We are now in the User Experience, Accesiblity and Performance phase in the Drupal 7 development cycle. The focus is on small user experience changes.

We are nearing the end of the Drupal 7 UX Project which has been exciting, challenging and frustrating from time to time.

I would like to reflect on the process so far, and hope to create an open dialog about how we can learn from this project to power future efforts in Drupal.