TYPO3 User Experience Week 2018 (#T3UXW18) Recap

The 2018 version of the well-established TYPO3 User Experience Week (T3UXW) came to an end on Sunday. 30 hand-picked participants from 6 different countries met in Festenburg, Upper Harz, Germany - an area where the most dominant phone service provider is “No Service” - to improve the user experience of TYPO3 for editors, integrators and developers.

The range of participants went from backend developer over language experts to UX specialists enabling us to assess the full scope of topics.

Results vary from already merged or pending patches, over refined concepts and storyboards to collections of ideas for future development - too many to list them all. Let’s look at some of the results in more detail:

Backend UX / Design:

Save Button Gate

One bigger topic tackled by our team was the implementation of the new Save-Button concept. As some of you probably noticed the refactoring of the save button to a split button had a lot of mixed feedback - but it was never meant to be the final state. Prior to the User Experience Week Rachel Foucard created a full concept for the save button states and behaviour which was discussed and refined together with Benjamin Kott. On the User Experience Week, Rens Admiraal and Patrick Broens started implementing that concept - which contains unroled and responsive buttons as well as sensible context-specific actions. For more details, see link below.

Module Menu, Icons and Tabs

The icons in the backend - especially those in the module menu - start to look a bit dated and less valuable than they could. Luis Pato created a guideline for new module icons, implemented a proof of concept for a new module menu design and additionally created a documentation for creating icons.

Additionally to improve the usability of the backend for mobile users, Dirk Jüttner created a new concept for handling of tabs in the backend edit forms - making mobile editing more pleasant. The concept is now in refinement phase and can be used as base for future implementations.

… more to come

We of course tackled more than just these topics, like reworking the representation of checkboxes, implementing the link browser as a modal instead of the pop up and improving the handling of the install tool - stay tuned for more changes in future TYPO3 versions.

SEO

For the SEO interested of you (which should be nearly everyone in a way) there are two bigger changes: A new MetaTag API making it easier to add and overwrite any kind of meta tag to your website and changes to the available default fields - providing SEO related fields like twittercards and opengraph fields by default. Get involved with this topic via the newly formed SEO initiative: https://typo3.org/community/teams/typo3-development/initiatives/typo3-seo-initiative/

As always on these events there was also time to enjoy some time off in a beautiful area of Germany - we had barbecues, a billiard tournament and some quiet evenings in the bar. The more active of us went hiking in the morning, swimming in the pool - and one adventurous soul even brought his bike.

An event is always only as good as its participants - and as events go, this was a fantastic one. I’d like to thank everyone for joining, working, arguing and laughing together. Thank you, Rens Admiraal, Patrick Broens, Andreas Fernandez, Rachel Foucard, Carla Froitzheim, Kai van Grunsven, Oliver Hader, Richard Haeser, Philipp Hamid, Colin Hasenau, Fiona Hasenau, Jo Hasenau, Björn Jacob, Dirk Jüttner, Artus Kolanowski, Benjamin Kott, Marco Christian Krenn, Thomas Maroschik, Frank Nägler, Ingo Nolden, Luis Pato, Gernot Ploiner, Mathias Schreiber, Stefan Schreiber, Michael Straschek, Kay Strobach, Tom Warwick, Marc Wessels and Ralf Zimmermann. And additionally thanks Kay, Luis, Petra and Richard for taking all the pictures and making them available for this news.

A special thanks certainly belongs to Petra Hasenau for providing everything anyone could ever need - be it sweets or fruits, medicine, tea or anything else.