Top 9 Modules to Streamline Your Drupal Site's User Experience

Chris from LevelTen recently posted a great article on Drupal modules for improved usability. However, these focused on the administrative side of the website, not end users. So here is our own list of modules for the front end of your site!

You do not want your Drupal site’s users to get lost in a myriad of long forms, fieldsets, page redirects, and confusing tagging. You want to do everything you can to make navigating your site and completing frequent routine tasks as painless as possible for the end user. This will keep them calm and give them warm fuzzies to know that they can use your Drupal site with ease without having to pop a Valium just to endure the overwhelming experience of encountering your site.

When you have relaxed, confident and in-control users - you have happy customers which can translate into more traffic, more sales, more word-of-mouth about your website! Now that sounds good doesn’t it? Here are nine sure-fire modules to ensure users aren’t selecting the “nightmare” button when interacting with your Drupal site.

Login toboggan allows users to login immediately either using their username or their email address, and it provides anonymous users a login form on Access Denied pages. Optionally, this module lets you direct users to a specific page when using the immediate login feature, or once an email address is validated.

One page profile, when used with the core profile module, allows users to edit their entire profile on one page as opposed to going to separate pages for each category.

Ajax comments allows users to post reply comments on the actual thread page itself, without needing a page refresh.

Username originality AJAX check lets visitors check username originality quickly during the registration process; thereby, making registration more convenient as you don’t need to submit your form to find out whether a username is already taken or not.

Multi-column check boxes radios is a form element to display checkboxes and radios in columns so that long forms are not as overwhelming. Visitors to your site are more likely to fill out a form or survey if they don’t feel it will take a huge chunk of time out of their lives. It’s all perception!

Better exposed filters module replaces the Views’ default single- or multi-select boxes with radio buttons or checkboxes, respectively, creating a better user experience by adding description fields and select all/none links to exposed view filters. People understand checkboxes and radio buttons, but have a harder time grokking click and cntrl+click to select multiple items and to deselect items.

Active tags is a front-end widget that simplifies the user process of assigning tags or taxonomy terms in order to keep the classification system simple and small, instead of the confusion of comma-separated-tags.

Form defaults allows the user to edit and improve the text or display order on forms such as titles and descriptions in form fields that were created by the developer. These defaults can be altered all without knowing or changing any PHP code. Score! 

Vertical tabs module tidies up all the fieldsets so that when a user goes in to edit a node, content type, or block all the fields are stacked and neatly organized resulting in improved efficiency, less visual clutter and a stronger overall user experience with the administrative side of things.