Empathy for internal users: Build and train for real content admins

Drupal is a powerful tool for building, managing and presenting structured content, which can be an overwhelming experience for anyone who isn’t well-versed in Drupal terminology or UI conventions. Fortunately, Drupal is extremely flexible and extendable, which allows us, as builders, to create a sensible, focused experience for content admins. We’ll walk through real examples that leverage tools from the contrib and core space, like Paragraphs Browser, Media suite and Field Groups, along with admin theme, architecture and UX customizations to create a delightful and straightforward content admin experience.

In the second half of the presentation, we will take this thoughtful admin experience we’ve created and make it functional for our client team. We will walk through strategies to effectively train any audience, including a demo training of the example we reviewed in the first half.

You will learn how to:

• Use out-of-the-box tools to improve standard Drupal admin conventions
• Leverage grouping and UI patterns to create logical fieldsets in Drupal’s admin UI.
• Align frontend designs with Drupal’s strengths to keep admin tasks focused,
• Frame Drupal terminology so it’s easier to learn 
• Ensure your training is aligned with the client’s current proficiency
• Make each item relevant to their ‘why’ of learning it
• Speak about familiar terms with the newness required to train inexperienced clients