Drupal Camp Scotland

Vicky Teinaki -

Apparently the mood in Edinburgh the night before Drupal Camp Scotland had been tense due to Nigel Farrage’ being in town. However, the biggest issue on the day was the weather, and organiser Duncan Davidson explained that “rain is a good sign for a Drupal Camp”, as it means that people don’t mind being inside on a Saturday.

Drupal Camp Scotland is unusual for a Drupal Camp in that the community part runs for one day rather than two. (As an out-of-towner, I appreciated having a day to recover for work). As someone who’d signed up to attend before the speakers were announced, I didn’t know what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised to see no fewer than three strands. I was particularly pleased to see some UX talks and workshops in the mix.

Also, the food was AMAZING.

Keynote speaker Robert Douglass (who was happy to come to the country responsible for his surname) was exasperated but not surprised when he found that while most of the room had their own side web projects online, only three included a means of taking payment on them. And one of those three was Commerce Guys.

He’d also noticed that he didn’t contribute to the Drupal community as much as he used to, and moreso that this was a common statistic for Drupal as a whole (aside from a large spike when Git was introduced). His take on both of these was that individuals needed to find ways to make profit so that they had the time (and finances) to contribute.

This is an interesting take on the whole issue of whether people should be expected to work on open source in their spare time.

Douglass expanded on a Reddit AMA quote from Dries that potential niches for making money in Drupal were as agencies, Drupal Hosting and Drupal services (in order of both decreasing ease to enter and increasing returns). Douglass is involved in the latter running a subscription service and sees this as an option for those people who raised their hands to make money. He also sees Drupal 8 as making this easier through a core API, safer theming via Twig and the new CMI.

Myles Davidson’s talk on ecommerce UX featured a lot of the hints that Orange Bus end up helping clients with: remove irrelevant information, provide inline help, have guest checkout and provide default settings.

There were a few specifics that got nodding approvals from the audience such as do search and recommendations well or not at all. There’s no way that a Man United fan would would buy an Arsenal shirt, so that implies that their site is faking data. It’s all the more a shame since John Lewis recently saw an 28% increase in conversions by implementing a proper recommendations strategy. There are even machine learning service available to help with this such as Nosto.

Davidson also pointed out to be careful about using the word ‘continue’ in carts (does that mean continue to checkout or continue shopping?)

What I particularly liked was how it was based on their own study (available as PDF) and so had stats to match.

It was also wonderfully in the spirit of DrupalCamps that a service provider asked for feedback and got it. Robert of Drupal Commerce asked if they had any usability issues to work through, and Davidson pointed out address books and coupons as issues… that they’d provided patches for.

Translation module Lingotek just became the most downloaded translation module in the Drupal directory. They offer different levels of translation from machine translation (similar to Google’s) to community or internal level to full Mechanical-Turk style outsourcing. The service can track changes in the source (if entities are added or amended) and that the translations happen ‘in an airlock’ that can then be imported in.

DISCLAIMER: I particularly like Lingotek since I won their raffle for a Nexus 7.

In the afternoon, UXer Lisa Rex got Drupalers doing DIY usability testing. It’s been a full 6 years, a long plane ride and a lot more job experience since I attended a similar workshop by Andy Budd, so I was curious to see how another practitioner does it. Five Drupal sites that participants were working on were tested. These ranged from a cookery site to a university PhD section! (As someone who’s actually done the latter, I felt that the needs for that are probably too niche for proper testing, but still, any testing is better than none). Attendees were split into teams of three to facilitate, notetake and participate.

Even testing two people (all that was possible in the time) started showing up serious issues, so it looks as if it’s a useful workshop to do.

Something that came up as recurring newbie tester mistakes were biasing the script (don’t ask to buy a voucher, ask to get a gift) and saying what it was you wanted to test (even if your hypothesis is that the navigation is wrong, you shouldn’t prompt people to ask about it).

Finishing up the day was the Scottish Drupal Awards. The winners were:

  • Best Drupal Site: College of Life Sciences at Dundee (internal)
  • Best Public/NFP site: John Muir Way (Heehaw)
  • Contribution of the year: Joachim Noreiko for Flag module maintenance. This was his win for the second year running, and he later hoped that there would be more Drupal contributions in the next year so that he didn’t win it for a third time.

Other talks that sounded great but I missed were the deconstruction of how the amazing Lush website was made (something our UX team were recently admiring), and the unimitable Jeffrey “Jam” McGuire on the potential mission of Drupal (I think). I’m hoping that others blog the tracks that they saw on the day. I also heard great things about the business day that ran the day before

Oh, and, finally, in pure Scottish style, Freudian slip of the day.