#Media Initiative

Usability review

We discussed this issue at 📌 Drupal Usability Meeting 2025-07-18 Active . The recording with a timestamp to the part addressing this issue can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgAuZ781Vdg&t=2900s. For the record, the attendees at the usability meeting were @benjifisher, @rkoller, and @simohell. This meeting was the second part of our walkthrough of the user tasks entailed in the issues listed in the issue summary as well as the media module in Drupal core in general. The first part of the walkthrough was covered in 📌 Drupal Usability Meeting 2025-07-11 Active and the link to the recording is https://youtu.be/FPYyputdZzQ.

The group is in line with the proposed solution to use the contextual link pattern. Users are already familiar with them from the frontend as well as Layout Builder, so being consistent using the same icon and behavior in the context of media items is a good idea.

The only detail that might have room for improvement from our perspective is the icon choice. The pencil icon has a rather specific affordance - people are used to that kind of icon solely in the context of actually editing something. But already the options used in the image in the issue summary (detach, override, and translate) have no close affinity to the concept of “editing” - the suggestion of a download option raised #25 → is blurring the line further. So we’ve wondered if it wouldn’t be the better choice to go with a more generic icon, something like the three vertical dots icon used on the navigation top bar or a downward facing caret icon? If the decision to use a different icon for the contextual link button should be taken, the icon should be changed for media items, the frontend and Layout Builder consistently - but that choice could probably be moved to a followup.

I'll remove the needs usability review tag and set the status back to needs work (but was not completely sure what the right pick should be, active or needs work)

If you want more feedback from the usability team, a good way to reach out is in the #ux channel in Slack.