We’ve completely revamped the reports, packing in detailed information that’s easy to read and a pleasure to break down both for admins and for advertisers.

The All-New Admin Interface

Log in to the reports page and you’ll now see an overview that provides a quick tour of your advertising program. It’s clear, it’s instantly available and it’s easy to understand. You’ll see:

Active/Inactive Advertisers

Now that you can easily which advertisers are inactive, you can reach out to them and make them an offer they can’t refuse. Bring them back as paying customers.

Active/Inactive Campaigns

See information on inactive campaigns, talk to the advertisers and help them to relaunch.

Active/Inactive Ads

See which ads have stopped running, and dream up incentives to get them moving again.

Revenue Earned Last Month/This Month

A summary of where you were last month and where you are this one. Expect those figures to keep growing!

Most Paying Advertiser

Spot your best advertiser and make sure they keep promoting on your site and contributing to your revenue.

Highest Click Ratio Ad

See which ad won the highest CTR. Contact that advertiser, show them the stats and use their example to boost the click rates of other advertisers. Keeping your advertisers engaged will keep them coming back and paying for more advertising space.

Most/Least Successful Campaigns

Talk to advertisers whose campaigns are failing and offer them some advice. Show them examples of the most successful campaigns and help them create their ads. They’ll see a massive improvement and understand why you’re worth paying.

To see the details of any report just click the report’s number or name. You’ll have all the information you need to keep your advertisers happy — and paying.

A Revamped Advertiser Interface

The Advertiser Interface provides detailed information about campaigns and active ads. All information is specific to the advertiser.

Campaigns

See which ads are doing best; the number of impressions; the number of clicks generated; and even the click ratio. The campaigns view also shows CPI and CPC ad data.

Brand New Graphs

Data is presented in beautiful new graphs. Enjoy a birds-eye view of all an advertiser’s campaigns and ads.

Graphs can be adjusted to show a predefined period (Last Month, Last Week, This Week, This Month) or set to show a custom time period.

Graphs also show impressions, clicks and click ratio. All the information you need about your advertisers is just a click away.

Bootstrap3

And that’s not all!

Our designers have also upgraded Ad Agency to the latest Bootstrap 3. That makes for a fabulous design and our new reports take full advantage of it. Clear design equals easy and intuitive use.

Export All Data

In addition to seeing those reports in beautiful graphs, Ad Agency now lets publishers and advertisers export all data as PDF or CSV files. Exported data comes from the tables below the graphs on Overview, Advertisers and Campaign pages.

There’s much more…

I’ve only touched base with this newsletter. In the backend there are so many options that haven’t been discussed yet. Overview is only one part of it. There are also reports per advertiser or per campaign with a total breakdown.

See Ad Agency Demo

Demo site URL: http://joomla35.ijoomlademo.com/index.php/control-panel

Login: demo

Password: demo

Buy Ad Agency Pro Today! Get 20% discount!

It’s easy! Just go to: http://adagency.ijoomla.com/pricing/ and pick your package. Or click the button below to add Ad Agency Pro to your cart!

Use this promo code to get the 20% discount:

newreports

This promo code expires on Friday, 12th of September at midnight PST so don’t miss this amazing offer. Please also note that all new features added to Ad Agency are available only for Joomla 3.X.

Thank you!

Finally, thank you for letting us earn your business. At iJoomla we shoot for the best and we work hard to be able to give you a better product with every release. We hope you and your advertisers enjoy the new reports.

Comments? Questions?

Please leave them below.

It’s a really exciting step and we’re really proud to be part of a small group of leading companies — and the first Joomla developer — to accept Bitcoins.

Why Bitcoins?

We believe in what Bitcoin stands for. We want to help spread the word about the currency, get more people involved and raise excitement about this groundbreaking tool as much as possible.

Got Bitcoins?

If you’ve ever wanted to get your hands on JomSocial – the hottest social networking app for Joomla — but didn’t have the cash, you now have a great opportunity. Those Bitcoins sitting around in your wallet can become a thriving online community.

How to buy our Joomla extensions with Bitcoin:

Just check out as normal, and choose “Bitcoin” as the payment method. On the next page you will see the Bitcoin amount and the QR code. Scan the code or copy and paste the address. Once the payment is approved, you’ll be automatically taken to the “My Downloads” page to download your product.

iJoomla – Leading the way

At iJoomla we always strive to be the leaders in the Joomla industry. From design and development to support and quality assurance, we’re always looking for exciting ways to break new ground. Accepting Bitcoins gives you the opportunity to pay with your favorite currency and be a part of the Bitcoin revolution — and it’s part of our mission to keep leading the way.

Comments? Questions?

Please post them below.

So the CMS Expo got off to a pretty good start. The CMS Awards, in which developers were recognized for outstanding work in a number of different categories, were held on the first day… and Guru, our new learning management system for Joomla, won the an award for Best Joomla LMS! We are super excited because a lot of sweat went into this one, and it’s nice to see your work rewarded.

It’s even nicer though to see all the great things our customers have been doing with it. Take a look at some of these examples:

• OSTraining.com
• PhotographersClubHouse.com
• TheOnlineTrainingSite.com

Since Guru’s release nine months ago, we’ve been able to convert it to Joomla 2.5 and to release twelve new versions with lots of new features. Our goal is to make Guru not only the best LMS for Joomla but also the best LMS of any platform. We think we’re getting there.

If you haven’t looked at Guru yet, check out the demo and our live learning center.

Weever Apps Make An Impression

Have you noticed that many of your visitors are stopping by on their mobile devices? The guys from Weever Apps are ahead of you. They’ve got themselves some serious funding that allows them to take mobile for Joomla and other CMS to the next level. They have a super slick component for Joomla (1.5 and 2.5) that allows you to have a very professional mobile version of your site in minutes. It’s very cool.

I met up with Andrew and Rob of Weever and spoke with them about how they can help our customers by adding mobile support to our extensions. We’ll be starting with Guru, DigiStore and Surveys. This could be a very exciting thing for us and our customers, and we will let you know how we get on.

Weever Apps Presenting at CMS Expo

If you’d like to see a live example of Weever Apps, go to seo.ijoomla.com using your mobile device.

Meeting Paul Orwig, the new OSM president

Paul Orwig, OSM President

Definitely one of the highlights of the Expo for me was meeting Paul Orwig, the new president of OSM. Although we’ve met previously, I got a better chance this time to have a meaningful chat with him about Joomla, its future and, of course, usability. My old friend Kendall Cabe and I composed a list of easy to fix usability issues in Joomla 2.5 and discussed it with Paul, and we hope that the team will take the time to fix them. These are mainly cosmetic changes that are very easy to fix, even within a day! I will try to post this list here on our blog shortly.

80 Learning Tracks

This CMS Expo was the biggest yet, with 80 learning sessions about topics ranging from SEO, design, social media and of course, my own Usability Testing workshop that was super fun and interactive.

Giveaways

Once again, some of the sponsors gave away iPads and other goodies. I didn’t win this time either but a new friend won — and on his birthday too, so well done to him!

The best part…

Expert Panel at CMS Expo

The best part about CMS Expo is always meeting customers and developers and getting to know them on a personal level We all spend way too much time in front of the computer and we tend to forget that behind every name or email there is a real person, CMS Expo helps us remember that every year!

There’s an app extension for that

Extensions exist that tackle this problem. jFusion is the biggest player in this arena, and really shines when you need to merge users from Joomla to other CMS’s or scripts such as vBulletin, XenForo, Magento and others. It has it’s flaws though, and after using it for a while I started searching for a different option. After searching for a few weeks I came across this post on Joomla.org. After messing around with many different “extension based” solutions I was excited to try a more backend approach to the problem. Extensions are fine to a point, but jamming your site full of every plugin/component/module that you see on Joomla.org is only going to give you more trouble than it’s worth. Digging into how things work will give you a better understanding of how your site operates and how to keep things lean. In this case, the solution is not all that complicated either.

Random Indeed.

Warning, Warning Will Robinson!!

This is considered an advanced project that should only be tackled by somebody who is familiar with phpmyadmin, (or some sort of sql tool), how to run sql queries, and is very comfortable with Joomla and it’s inner workings. This should only be attempted on a development site, not on your live site, unless you have a sure fire recovery plan in place already and have no live traffic. Now, with that being said, let’s move on to how we can link two jos_user tables together.

DANGER! SQL QUERIES AHEAD!

How to use two Joomla sites with one user table?

Birnik covered the how to pretty well in his post, so there is no sense in me re-inventing the wheel. The only thing I might add is that it is very important to go slow, take your time, turn off any distractions and think the entire thing through.

This looks scarier than it actually is

Keeping users logged in

Birniks solution is supposed to keep users logged in, so for example, if somebody logs into Site A, and then navigates to Site B, they should not have to re-enter their login info into Site B. I was not so lucky, and it did not work for me. That may be because I was using subdomains instead of sub directories. In the past I tried jFusion and it has a similar quirk, so I was aware of a Joomla core hack that modifies how cookies are handled and allows you to navigate between sites without getting logged out. You can read more about it here. Ignore anything about Moodle, it is not relevant to our situation.

Complications?

The only problem I ran into was when new users signed up. They should all go though the main website to register. If they sign up on the slave/sub sites, you will get errors for new users. It’s an easy enough fix however, just add some redirects to send people signing up on the sub sites to the main site.

What’s your solution? Did it work for you?

Do you have any personal experience with attempting to join multiple Joomla sites together? How did it go? Let us know in the comments.

This is just one of many usability tests we plan to do for Ad Agency; we are committed to making it the most user-friendly Joomla extension in the world!

Giles Fabris of DieHardCustomers agreed to act as the advertiser. He went through the sign-up and ad placement process.

Usability testing video:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/26933639[/vimeo]

Issues found:

The main issues were that notices were in the wrong places at the wrong times and that there was a lack of emphasis on the desired action button.

1. The “Your account pending approval” notice isn’t clear enough.
2. The “Select the ad type” notice isn’t clear enough.
3. User didn’t see the home button.
4. The notice on the adding banner page is confusing.
5. The notice on the adding campaign page is confusing.
6. The user seems stuck on an endless loop, confused by the placement of the notices.
7. The user tends to click on the Cancel button instead of the Continue button

As always, the best action to take after doing usability testing is simply to get to work and fix all the issues as quickly as possible. And so we did. It took us a a couple of days to make the changes and add a few enhancements on both Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6+ versions. Now a new and improved version is available for download.

Here’s a list of changes:

1. Changed “Your application is pending approval. Meanwhile you can add your banner/ads.” to: “Your advertising account application is pending approval. As soon as we approve your application, we will send you an email. In the meantime, you can still add banners and campaigns.”
2. Removed the notice “You have no campaigns available for this banner type/size. Please add a new campaign here.”
3. Removed the notice on campaign creation: “There are no banners available for this campaign. Banner/Ad requirements:..”
4. Placed “Add Banners” link on campaigns that have no banners.
5. Instead of using the .button class for all the buttons, we added our own classes. The Cancel button is now in light gray and the Action button in orange so that the user can easily see what to do next.
6. Changed “Select the ad type” to “Below you will find a list of the available ad types. Click on the one you’d like to add to continue”
7. Made the “Home” button smaller and added a link to “Advertiser Dashboard.”

Placed "Add Banners" link on campaigns that have no banners.

Instead of using the .button class for all the buttons, we added our own classes. The Cancel button is now in light gray and the Action button in orange so that the user can easily see what to do next.

You can download the latest version here. Enjoy the improved Ad Agency and stay tuned for more usability improvements soon.

Here’s the usability testing video:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/26944561[/vimeo]

Usability Testing Summary:

• Giles can see that some module position names make some sense but they are not clear. He thinks that by clicking those modules he will see more detail about each position. He is surprised to find that the module position changes when he clicks.
• I asked him how he can find the position that goes on the left.
• He decides to open the Template Manager.
• He is confused by the two stars on two different templates. He is not sure which is the default template and he doesn’t understand the difference between the “site” and “administrator” templates.
• He opens the site default template but is confused because it doesn’t look like the old one. He can no longer find the the “preview” button and thinks that by clicking on the “view sites” he will see the positions.
• He tries the admin template but that doesn’t help either.
• He decides to click the Help button but he is still not sure what the default template is.
• He tries to look at the template link, but only finds a page for information about the template.
• At this point, Giles said he would call me for help.
• He clicks the Help button again but doesn’t find it useful and says he is not expecting Joomla to be user-friendly.
• At this point he would give it five minutes then seek help from a Joomla professional.

Recommendations:

These issues are “low hanging fruits”: they’re obvious problems that are easy to fix.

1. Show only site templates by default. Users will see only one star for the default template, just like Joomla 1.5
2. Bring back the site preview with the positions feature, and place a link to it right where the user selects a module position.
   

   Place a link to the site preview with module positions right where the user selects a module position

3. Show a video tutorial inside the Help window.

I asked Giles to provide some last words about his usability experience. This is what he had to say:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/26958673[/vimeo]

Making Joomla more user-friendly should not be hard. It requires taking a few weeks off development to focus on usability testing and fixing the UI. Ninety percent of the usability issues that I found are very easy to fix. I will be performing more usability testing for Joomla 1.7 and hopefully the Joomla team will implement some of the recommendations.

What is your usability experience with Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7?

My Facebook profile without photos on top

A few weeks ago, I explained why the new Facebook profile doesn’t work. One of the main issues was the photos that show at the top of the profile seem totally random and are very distracting. A friend pointed that hovering over the pictures pulls up a “close” button that lets you replace the photo with a different one. Once I realized that I wasn’t stuck with the photos Facebook selected for me, I started to wonder what would happen if I just kept clicking that close button until there were no more photos to display.

As it turns out, a good thing happens!

if you keep clicking the close button, eventually the photos disappear and you gain a much cleaner profile page.

Then I wondered what would happen if I did the same thing with the rest of the information Facebook places at the top of the page. I really don’t want my details there, so I went to my “edit profile” page and deleted or hid everything. Again – success! Take a look at this video that documents this process. My excitement is evident.  I apologize for the sound quality.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19130565[/vimeo]

It took about five minutes for me to create a cleaner profile page. If the photos and information bother you too, give it a try!

It’s a neat little trick but the question remains: why do we need to work so hard to feel comfortable with our profile? Why isn’t Facebook giving us more options to control which information is showing where, and why isn’t the company admitting that its latest profile re-design is a total disaster.

What do you think about having your photos on top of the profile? Would you follow the above process to remove them?

****************

Edited a few hours after posting: My facebook photos are back on the top of the profile. I guess Facebook *really* wants them there. Sigh. I had to do the whole process again and the photos are gone…for now.

****************

Second update: Facebook kept putting back the photos. I ended up un-tagging myself from all the photos and even that didn’t entirely work, they just posted some un-tagged photos. Removed those now and so far my photos are still gone.

The new and not improved facebook profile page

Continuing our discussions about companies that seem to be run by monkeys is… Facebook. It’s not that I doubt Mark Zuckerberg’s genius or that Facebook revolutionized the way we connect with friends and family, but some of their user experience decisions really make me wonder. If I had to describe them in one word, it would be “juvenile.”

Why juvenile?

Because the people in charge of the changes seem to have no basic understanding of what Facebook members need or want, nor of basic design principles. It’s as though they’re following a whim rather than tracking user actions.

I’ve already written about the 14 biggest usability mistakes on Facebook. Nothing has improved since then. But a few days ago, Facebook rolled out a new profile page. In my opinion, it’s another huge step back in the user experience.

Let’s go over the new page from top to bottom and dissect it to find out why it doesn’t work.

Putting Common Knowledge at the Top

At the top of the page, we have the name — that’s good! — followed by a few details about who this person is in a relationship with, their birth date and education. This part of the page is the most valuable “real estate,” the area that everyone sees every time they look at the profile.

It’s now showing content that rarely changes and that friends and family already know — and it’s showing it ALL THE TIME. Every time I go to this person’s profile, I’m going to see the same information about them. Dear Facebook, this is my FRIEND. I already know who they are sleeping with, and their date of birth.

Dear Facebook, this is my FRIEND. I already know who they are sleeping with, and their date of birth.

On a public social network like LinkedIn, where I view a lot of profiles of people I know nothing about, it is helpful to include basic information at the top of the page (well, except for the relationship bit). It helps me to absorb quickly the basic information I need to determine whether I should do business with them.

But Facebook is a closed membership site. We use it to view profiles of friends and family, people with whom we’re already familiar. Showing basic information that doesn’t change at the top of the page makes no sense at all.

On the old profile, basic information like this was on the left side of the page, which made a lot of sense. It wasn’t in your face each time you visited the profile but it was there if you were looking for it.

Displaying Distracting Pictures at the Top

Under the relationship, education and birthday information, we bump into a bunch of what appears to be random pictures of this person taken from their albums. Again, it really begs the question: WHY? Photos grab attention and distract us from what we really came to do. That’s not to look at an old picture that we’ve already seen, but to see what’s new with our friend, what they’ve been up to lately, what’s on their mind. None of those things is likely to be a ski trip from 1997.

This collection of photos is so distracting and so in your face. It’s like someone jumping in front of you as you try to greet a friend.

Photos grab attention and distract us from what we really came to do

Sharing is Harder

Moving down, we see “Share: post, photo, link, video.” The box that allowed us to enter a comment just by clicking on a box and hitting Send is GONE. Now I have to find the share area and realize that I have to click on “post” before I can write anything. These are just way too many unintuitive steps for doing something that’s very basic.

The old comment box was one of the things that made Facebook such a success. Its simplicity had a huge psychological effect, encouraging people to send quick notes and stay in touch. Having a photo right next to that box was also important. All this is gone now, leaving us with tiny links under random photos that overshadow them completely. Now the feeling is that we need a reason to write.

The old comment box was one of the things that made Facebook such a success All this is gone now, leaving us with tiny links under random photos that overshadow them completely.

No Important Info on Top

Moving further down the page, we notice that we’re missing some useful tabs: walls, photos, info, links. Those tabs were taking us to the information we really needed when visiting someone’s profile — the stuff that changes regularly — and they were right on top, where they should be. But now they are on the left, under the photo, a less important region. The main spot is taken by those old vacation snaps.

It’s pretty basic stuff: put the important information top-center. Put the less important stuff on the left or bottom. Put the call to action at the top-right. It’s the ABC of user experience.

On the left, I can see who my friend is in a relationship with, and this time I can also see a picture of their partner; before it was just a link. That’s an improvement but do I really need to have this at top-center as well?

It's pretty basic stuff: put the important information top-center. Put the less important stuff on the left or bottom. Put the call to action at the top-right. It’s the ABC of user experience.

List of Friends Take More Space Than Necessary

Below the partner, I can see a list of friends, as before, but now instead of seeing six thumbnails that took a small amount of space, I get a list of TEN friends with names and picture, one after the other, that take a huge amount of space. Again, WHY? On average, people have about 150 friends. Since there is no way to show all those friends on the profile page, displaying just a small sample makes sense. Why show a much bigger sample in a format that takes a lot more space?

I do like the separate family list though. That’s useful. But the list of friends and family together is so long that you barely notice the links under them.

Why show a much bigger sample in a format that takes a lot more space?

Call to Actions Are Hard to See

On the right, moving the “chat,” “send message” and “poke” actions to the top right makes sense as far as usability is concerned but the photos to the left and under them make the actions hard to see.The 30 pixel gap below helps a bit though.

The photos to the left and under them make the actions hard to see

The Facebook profile page is the site’s most fundamental feature. Since people spend more time on Facebook than any other site on the Web, it’s important to get it right and not annoy them with visual noise and misplaced priorities. Making sure that the most important elements are top-center, that there are no distractions in the form of photos, that it doesn’t take too many steps to perform the most common actions, and that basic information doesn’t take prominence are all key to doing it right. In fact, the way it was before. Why fix something that’s not broken?

In other words, fire the current designer and hire back the previous one… with a bonus!

Joomla.org Magazine

Joomla.org has a great magazine. Its editor, Paul Orwig, recently asked me to perform a usability test to find out whether it was suffering from any problems.

Paul identified three tasks:

1. How do I register as an author, and is it clear that community members are invited to become contributing authors?
2. How do I contribute an article?
3. How do I browse all the articles for a specific topic?

We ran out of time before we reached the third task but we did cover the first and second tasks — and more. (Although there were a few sound problems during the recording, for which I apologize.)

Steve Bickel, the organizer of a Joomla meetup in San Diego agreed to help me test the Joomla.org magazine. Steve is an experienced Joomla developer who uses Joomla.org “sometimes” when he is looking for information. He’s never heard of the magazine though, so he made a perfect subject.

Part 1 – Finding the magazine and signing up as an author.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16775333[/vimeo]

I first asked Steve to find the magazine, which he did easily with the search box. Between 20-30 percent of users go first to search, without bothering with navigation.

Steve’s first impression was good. He liked the headlines and the images. He assumed that he could volunteer to be an author, which is great.

He found all the information about being an author and thought it was very well organized. However, he could not find the registration form to become an author “It’s confusing!” he said. He even thought he’d have to post a question on the forum. At this point we stopped the test in order to continue with the next task.

Recommendation: Add a “Sign Up Here” button on all the author information pages. The button should lead directly to the registration form.

Part 2 – Author registration

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16775389[/vimeo]

We discovered the registration link during the break and started the second test by trying to register as an author.

Steve filled out the form and tried to submit it, but nothing appeared to happen. He eventually discovered that his email had an error but the error message was very subtle and needed to be clearer.

Recommendation: Add a clear error message, such as an error prompt.

Part 3 – Submitting an article

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16775366[/vimeo]

I asked Steve to try to submit an article. He found the “Have an article to submit? Login” banner, and logged in easily.

Once he had logged in, he expected to see a form to submit his article, but reached his profile page instead.

He didn’t know what an “item” was, although he assumed it’s “probably not an article.” He did understand the term “bucket” however, so he clicked on the “article submission bucket” and reached something that “made no sense to me.”

He then clicked on “Add a new item” and finally reached the submit article form.

Steve and I during the usability test

I asked Steve about the purpose of the alias; he thought it was for SEO.

I asked him to add a picture. He clicked on an icon that he thought was for an image, but wasn’t. It took him a while to discover the image tab. He then clicked the browse button but there was no “Upload now” next to it, so he wasn’t sure how to finish uploading the picture. “I have no idea how to get this image there,” he said. Steve also couldn’t figure out the meaning of the image gallery or how it differed from the image itself.

He saw the “Select items” list, but couldn’t figure out what it was.

Next, Steve was ready to submit his article but couldn’t find a submit button. Even after removing the camtasia toolbar, Steve couldn’t find how to submit the form. He became frustrated and decided it was way too many “hoops” to jump. I noticed later that the save button was at the top of the screen.

Recommendations: Remove the alias field. It’s not the author’s job to do SEO and it’s unclear what they need to enter there.

Replace “item” with “Article.” Since we are asking authors to submit articles, call their submissions “articles.”

Place an “Upload image” field somewhere that’s easy to find.

Rename the “Save” button “Submit” and move it to the bottom of the article so that it follows the natural movement of the eye. I also recommend using a regular button rather than an image to make it clearer.

Conclusion:

Joomla.org  magazine is nicely done but has some usability issues that are probably preventing users signing up as authors and submitting articles. These are not big issues and can be fixed pretty easily.

The article submission form seems to be the main problem here. It’s too complicated and should be simplified to match what people want to do. The mockup below shows only the things the author really needs. The submit button is in its natural location: at the end of the form.

Submission Form Suggested Design

Here are some last words from Steve:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16851706[/vimeo]

Thank you Steve Bickel and Joomla Meetup San Diego for your help! If you’re in the San Diego area, come and join us for great information and some more usability testing. Each tester gets a free iJoomla extension!

Joomla 1.6 Nested Categories and ACL Usability Testing Video

Brad’s first impression was positive. He liked the clean look and the fact that it appeared very similar to 1.5.

Testing the nested categories feature

To test the nested categories feature, I asked Brad to create a pets category, place inside it categories for cats and dogs, and add a few canine sub-categories. Brad had no problem doing this.

Conclusion: for experienced Joomla 1.5 users, creating nested categories is an easy and understandable process.

Testing the ACL feature

The second task was to use the ACL feature. I asked Brad to find the feature and see if he understood how to use it.

Brad looked at the top menu and found it under Users – >Access Level.

Brad assumed that Level Title meant a group. He wasn’t sure what the hierarchy meant and said that he thought an info icon was missing.

After creating a new access level, Brad became confused about the meaning of what he had just done. “I’m not really sure what’s going on here,” he commented. He tried the help but found it wasn’t ready yet.

After opening the “customer level” he became even more confused about the hierarchy. At this point, said he may have to Google it in order to figure it out.

Brad tried a few things to understand the ACL but never quite got it. He said he would look for documentation and test it to see how it works.

Conclusion: the ACL feature is not as clear as it could be.

I later found the parameters that allow me to set permissions for each group, which is very cool, but Brad didn’t even realize that there was a permission box, so I would recommend that there should at least be a link at the top of the page and a “tooltip” for each group that describes its permissions. You can see this in the mockup below. Those two additions would help a great deal.

How we can improve the usability of the ACL edit page on Joomla 1.6

What do you think about the new ACL feature? How would you improve it?