Drupal.org redesign - An Experiment in Design by Community

Sholom Sandalow, Friday, January 9, 2009 @ 12:14 pm

Drupal, the popular open source Web Content Management System, has got a massive and passionate community of developers, designers and webmasters.   Drupal.org, their official website was faltering under the weight of this growing community of diverse users, so this past summer the powers that be at Drupal  decided to hire an outside agency to do a complete redesign of the site.  The firm they hired decided to take a "design by community" approach to the project.  They wanted to get as many Drupal users as they could to participate in the redesign.  So, through a number of collaboration mechanisms--setting up a Twitter account to follow mentions of Drupal, opening a Flickr account where the community could post pictures, and actively engaging the existing Drupal forums--they opened the design process up so that anyone in the Drupal community could share in the process.

Conventional wisdom says that design doesn't work as a democracy.  It takes the genius and inspiration of a small team or one person to understand what the customer needs, and design the right solution.  As Henry Ford said it best, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."  So I'm not surprised that according to Mark Boulton, the lead Designer on the project, many people though that this type of open process would fall flat on it's face.  I'm not convinced that it won't, but from what I've seen, the site is looking good.

It's still in prototype phase, so it remains to be seen if the redesign, once implemented, will be a success.  but you can get a look at the evolution of the design here, and of course follow the links to the discussions.  It's a fascinating look at one designers experiment in design by community.

user experience design

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