In the past month the team at HiDef has taken a look at Drupal and CiviCRM from a few different angles. First, we took a look at the out-of-the-box user experience for visitors coming to your website. Then we looked at usability from a software developer's perspective. Now we're going to put together a composite that tries to answer the question, "What is it like to use Drupal and CiviCRM to create and manage events, contributions, and all the other tools it provides for my web presence?" Our hope is that once we've explored this question, we'll be better poised to contribute back to the projects through participating in improving the user experience across the board.

To frame our discussion I'd like to create a persona, a fictitious yet could-be-real person, named Alisa. She'll help us bring a level of tangibility to the nonprofit's experience.

Meet Alisa, Nonprofit CiviCRM User 

Alisa works for the non-profit organization that Ned donated to and volunteered with a few weeks ago. Alisa is in her early forties and, though she's accustomed to email, instant messaging, and even a little bit of Skype, administering her organization's website has been a learning experience. Having familarized herself with how the Drupal end of the site works by publishing blog posts and updating the staff directory from time to time, she has now been commissioned to create and manage content using a new tool recently added to Drupal, CiviCRM.

Alisa is a willing learner, capable, and patient with new technology. However, she doesn't know HTML code or what to do if technical errors are encountered. Let's see how Alisa feels about her Drupal+CiviCRM experience.

We'll jump right into her first experience: the Dashboard. She gets here by logging into the Drupal website and clicking CiviCRM from the Admin menu.

The Dashboard

CiviCRM's Dashboard, introduced in version 3.0

As of CiviCRM 3.0 (Oct 2009), Alisa's greeted by a personal dashboard. She's able to see the latest activity across all consituents, events, and contribution pages. She can also click Configure my Dashboard to pick the things she wants to see.

What Alisa Likes about the Dashboard

• Admin navigation bar along the top mirrors the one she's already used to when she's managing the main site's content
• Common actions a click away. There's no need to go fishing around for five minutes to do something (See screenshot below)
• Ability to add new contacts right from the dashboard, something she constantly needs to do and has found herself writing on scraps of paper too many times (See screenshot below).

Easy one-click access to common actions

Alisa can add a new individual right from the dashboard

What Alisa Dislikes about the Dashboard

• Alisa has to configure her dashboard in order to see anything in it. She, like most users, likes to see the "default" view and then be able to customize it.
• She can't pinpoint it, but she finds the interface a little clunky. The spacing between elements in the left nav bar, the styling of the dashboard boxes and choice of icons; the form buttons used for non form tasks; the contact search bar in the top left corner above the logo sitting above; inconsistent graphical elements. All of these things add up to make for a daunting aesthetic.
• Though the dashboard is great, scroll bars and little white space make for a clunky viewing experience for each widget.

Overall, the dashboard is the best initial experience for CiviCRMers since the inception of the system. In fact, if there's one thing Drupal could use, it would be a similar "staging" area where folks find themselves after logging in to Drupal. On the other hand, as the dashboard is relatively new, it is primed for refinement and simplification for folks like Alisa who do the day-in-day-out work of connecting to all the constituents in her organization.

Events and Contribution Pages

Alisa becomes very familiar with the Dashboard in almost no time. She now needs to master creating and managing Events and Contribution pages.

The workflows for creating events and contributions are, admittedly, robust. The fact is, there is a lot for a nonprofit to consider when putting on events and collecting contributions. It's typically not just a matter of "come to the event." Nonprofits have different types of events and different types of participants for those events. Think about attendees, hosts, and volunteers, to name a few. Some events are paid, some are free. When we start talking donations, there are even more decisions to be made.

These considerations made, how does Alisa feel that CiviCRM does in guiding her through these steps as she seeks to get her tasks done?

What Alisa Likes about Creating Events & Contribution Pages

• The workflows cover all the bases, no doubt about it. By the time she is finished filling out all the forms, her events and contributions are ready for folks to get involved. Nice.
• The workflows are broken up in more-or-less intuitive chunks. Get your basic info down, save and move to the next step, save an move to the next step, and so on. This step-by-step is especially helpful while creating a contribution page. (See screenshot below)
• The fields that site visitors see (like welcome messages, footer messages, and thank-you receipt messages) have convenient What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get ("Wizzy Wig") editing so that Alisa can infuse personality into the messaging that folks see--without knowing HTML.
• Alisa finds it awesome that she can choose what type of Event or what type of Contribution she is setting up (See screenshot below). Such customizability options provide her organization a lot of flexibility and cause her to view CiviCRM not just as a point-and-click donor solution, but as a starter package that can mirror exactly how her organization does things. (Zach talked a bit about this quality of CiviCRM in his post)

The first screen of the Contribution Page creation process

The ability to define and specify contribution types is great

What Alisa Dislikes about Creating Events & Contribution Pages

• Alisa is admittedly overwhelmed by all of the event and contribution page creation workflows initially. Especially when working with the Contribution workflow, she would enjoy more direct messaging about how to choose all of the options (Brian's suggestion for walking users through processes better with in-context help is applicable here, too). Perhaps splitting up the experience with Basic/Advanced modes is something to look into for Alisa as well.
• She hits snags caused by lack of proper configuration. For example, when she test drives the contribution page she creates, she gets an error that says her payment information is invalid due to a payment processor. She isn't sure what it all means, and it takes her IT folks a while to realize that the Paypal payment processor isn't set up correctly.
• Resulting Contribution page and Event signup pages cannot be customized without someone digging into code. On the Event signup form, for example, she wants a big "Register Now" button positioned prominently along the right side of the page instead of at the bottom, where it sits as a text link by default. She can't find a way.
• Alisa also feels limited in what she can do in her messaging, even with the WYSIWYG editor. She can't upload and arrange photos by herself without learning FTP and server-side file paths, and she needs to consult with a more tech-savvy person to figure out how to put a thank you video on the "Thank You" message for a contribution page. She wishes including multimedia could be more straightforward.

What It's like for Alisa to Manage Her Events and Contribution Pages

Now that she's creating events and contribution pages, what is it like for Alisa to manage them as folks start interacting? She'll need to keep tabs on how many folks have signed up, contributed, asked questions, or hit snags and need assistance. She needs to "check the thermometer" on a regular basis and do some analysis for reporting purposes. Here's what Alisa likes and dislikes about this management experience.

• Like: At-a-glance status screens make it easy for her to login and get a daily view of activity (See screenshot below)
• Dislike: She wishes that she could easily view activity filtered by individual contribution pages that she's set up rather than having to order by Source in the dashboard
• Like: The CiviEvent dashboard gaves Alisa a quick synopsis of the status of all event registrations, followed by a table of the most recent registrations (See screenshot below)
• Dislike: As with the contributions, she wishes she could simply click on the event or contribution page she's interested in and see the summary and recent activity specific to that event. She finds having to filter to do so cumbersome (See screenshot below)
• Like: The ability to make a search to find just about anything, including participants who have both registered for an event and donated through a contribution page. It takes her some time, but she is able to do some pretty cool searches that start showing correlations between the different activities folks can get involved in through the system.
• Dislike: She'd like to see more "heavy lifting" done for her rather than having to perform a search to glean wisdom. To dovetail on her dislikes already mentioned above, Alisa doesn't like having to perform a search to find all volunteer attendees of a certain event. Shouldn't she instead be able to go to that event and click a link such as, "View Registered Volunteers for this event"?

The CiviContribute Dashboard

The top of the CiviEvent dashboard

The bottom of the CiviEvent dashboard

The Final Word

There are many things we haven't done in writing about Alisa's experience. For instance, we haven't taken a good look at how Drupal and CiviCRM work together, instead focusing on how CiviCRM behaves within Drupal. In a follow up post I'll take a look at Alisa's experience syncing constituents between the two platforms, linking to contribution pages and events from Drupal pages, and so on. We should keep in mind, also, that CiviEvent and CiviContribute are just two of the five main components available in CiviCRM, and Alisa's barely scratched the surface on what these two can do, let alone the other three (did you know that any contact in your organization can have his or her own personal contribution pages for fundraising?).

When it comes to creating and managing events, contribution pages, and other actions for her organization, Alisa's experience is fair. She is able to do the basics, though not without confusion and a bit of frustration at times. It's when she wants to start customizing things or creating custom data or reports that she starts getting hung up altogether. There are also a few errors that seem to stem from improper configuration or strange handling of duplicate email addresses.

With a trusted techie alongside her, there isn't much Alisa can't do with CiviCRM in the long run. She just hopes that as she progresses in her skills, and CiviCRM progresses as a tool, she'll be able to do more "out-of-the-box" the way that makes the most sense.

At HiDef we believe that as CiviCRM grows, usability and ease-of-use should be central focuses for the thousands of Alisa's out there whose organizations are in need of all it has to offer.