Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

[UX] Rename field types to be less technical #4204

Open
ghost opened this issue Nov 14, 2019 · 4 comments
Open

[UX] Rename field types to be less technical #4204

ghost opened this issue Nov 14, 2019 · 4 comments

Comments

@ghost
Copy link

ghost commented Nov 14, 2019

@herbdool made the point in Gitter that the average, less technical person might not know what a 'Boolean' field is. Here's my response that followed:

Heh, probably not. I can do a small-segment study to find out if you like (i.e. I'll ask my wife)

So just asked my wife about each of the field types in Backdrop. She didn't know what the following were:
Boolean
ISO
Unix
Float
Integer
Term reference

So anyplace we use those words, might need to clarify them or rename them.
Now might be important to note that my wife's not the type of person who'd be confident enough to setup a Backdrop site herself. She has one I've setup for her and uses it as an editor though. So if we want people to be able to setup Backdrop without prior knowledge, might need to rethink some wording...

If we want to promote Backdrop to people without them needing prior knowledge of booleans, ISO dates, etc., we should consider renaming some of these field types.

#1041 is a similar issue, but discusses reorganising the field type list, not specifically renaming them to be less technical.

EDIT: The above comments do not imply that I think women are less technical than men. Rather that my wife was the first and closest person available to me to ask questions of as a non-Backdrop user.

@herbdool
Copy link

I propose at the very least that we update the documentation (if it doesn't exist already) and also add some help text on the field edit page to explain the field and use cases (or link to docs).

Some might be easier to rename than others. I can imagine renaming to: "Yes/No (Boolean)". Some of the others are harder and perhaps just stick to improving the help text. I can't imagine how to make "term reference" easier but still precise.

@stpaultim
Copy link
Member

stpaultim commented Oct 1, 2020

We did a quick demo for Open Source Day on how fields worked and talked about the need for names that are easier to understand for non-technical users. If any ODS participants have opinions on this, please let us know. We're not ready to write a Pull Request on this, but definitely need feedback from experienced users and Backdrop CMS beginners.

I'm going to add a screen shot for how fields are used in context to help with this discussion.

This screenshot is from a page to edit/add fields to a custom content type.

Events___Backdrop_and__2__Olaf_Grabienski_on_Twitter____backdropcms_My_pleasure_____Twitter_and_Github__39_messages__30_unread_-Connection_Logging_Enabled

The goal is to somehow preserve the flexibility and power of all these options, but making them easier to understand.

@klonos
Copy link
Member

klonos commented Nov 3, 2020

Some might be easier to rename than others. I can imagine renaming to: "Yes/No (Boolean)". Some of the others are harder and perhaps just stick to improving the help text. I can't imagine how to make "term reference" easier but still precise.

As I have mentioned in the related #779, the contrib module https://www.drupal.org/project/dream_fields does a good job at improving the terminology, and I like how it asks the site builder what they would like to end up with (which widget), then moves into asking questions about what kind of data is to be stored in the database, or where to source that from:

image

@klonos
Copy link
Member

klonos commented Nov 3, 2020

d8-dream_fields-widget_options-list_of_checkboxes

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants