Must-Have Drupal Modules for Excellent User Experience

In the survey for Digital Marketing Trends, Econsultancy asked companies what they found a most exciting opportunity for 2019. The results showed customer experience came in the first place, beating even mobile marketing and content marketing. In an article below we gathered the best Drupal modules that could improve customer experience on your web sites.

But first, let’s see what Drupal actually is and all the advantages it has to offer.

🚀Read: Chatbot: What Is It and How to Build One 🚀 

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a web content management platform that helps to build the right tool to serve your content management strategy. Enterprises, businesses, brands, and organizations all use Drupal to build and maintain their websites and apps we use every day, and to create great solutions that will empower web innovations.

Drupal advantages are:

•         great features
•         flexibility
•         highly scalable
•         accountability
•         there are no licensing fees; Drupal is free
•         anyone can download it
•         have large open-source community

Some of the many great features include content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security.

Drupal Community

One of the largest open source communities in the world that are constantly improving their tools and processes is the Drupal community.

As Drupal said on their website: „We’re more than 1,000,000 passionate developers, designers, trainers, strategists, coordinators, editors, and sponsors working together. We build Drupal, provide support, create documentation, share networking opportunities, and more. Our shared commitment to the open-source spirit pushes the Drupal project forward. New members are always welcome.“

Picture 1. Drupal community

Simply, it is the best resource to understand all that Drupal has to offer.

Drupal 8

Drupal 8 is the biggest Drupal update. Some of the best-known technologies are a part of Drupal 8. It is available in 100 languages, it has more than 200 features and improvements that will ensure digital success.

One of the main advantages of Drupal 8 is it’s focused on user experience. Other advantages are shown in the picture below:

Picture 2. Drupal benefits

Best Drupal Modules for Amazing User Experience

MMenu

One of the easiest to use, yet powerful Mmenu, has throughout the years has become one of the leading Drupal 8 modules.  Mmenu  is a responsive menu module that enables you to set up a mobile off-screen menu that appears at the click of a button. Plus, it provides a number of excellent features and can easily combine two different menu entities.

Touchscreen support is also amazing – it is in collaboration with Superfish and hammer.js. And also, according to Drupal: “This module comes with some basic CSS but needs customization for your theme so requires some basic theming knowledge.”

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMP, a simple and robust module is here to ensure that the website is fast as it simplifies the HTML, streamlines CSS rules, restricts the use of Javascript and delivers pages via a Google AMP cache. 

The AMP module converts the existing Drupal pages into pages that comply with the AMP standard. It provides special AMP forms for text, image, and video fields. As Specbee said: “The AMP module is especially useful for marketers as it is a great addition to optimize their Drupal SEO efforts.”

One of the benefits of this module is a simple implementation in Drupal. All you’ve got to do is download the module, upload it and configure it to your website: 

Also, there are two main components of AMP module:

1. AMP Theme
2. AMP PHP Library

Read more about the AMP module set-up and adjustments in Specbee article! 

Field Group Drupal

The Field Group module is designed and developed for grouping and structuring fields together in various ways. With this module, grouping similar fields into tabs seems easier than ever, as people are able to visualize the content on site. It works great for editing content and cleaning content types.

Also, with this Drupal module, you can group fields in both frontend and backend of your site.

GraphQL

This module is becoming very popular these days and is a great fit for Drupal sites. GraphQL is a query language for APIs and one of the technologies that enable you to gather existing data from the Drupal website. It allows the front-end of your apps to pull content from the Drupal website and arrange it within the app. 

Picture 4. GraphQL & Drupal

Rabbit Hole

This resourceful Drupal module helps to control and manipulate website entities. Translated, Rabbit Hole as such makes it easier it easier to control what on the website is visible or hidden from your visitors. Since more complex websites have millions of entities, such as individual pages, posts and landing pages, Rabbit Hole is an amazing add-on for the user experience. 

And also, according to Champions Digital: “Rabbit Hole allows you to easily create redirecting or blocking behavior that makes this content inaccessible, making your site so much cleaner, for crawlers and users, should they happen to stumble upon one of the pages they weren’t meant to.”

Send User Notification

Drupal module Send User Notifications allows the administrator to send the notification messages to website users about any information, gift cards, vouchers, or any type of activity to their email messages.

Also, according to Drupal: “This module gives facility to admin user to configure the Email message from the back-end. It also uses the tokens that will really help to admin to create the dynamic email message.”

Picture 5. Notification setting

Servicebot

Servicebot is a platform designed to price, sell, and manage SaaS subscriptions. And it is a UI toolkit for Stripe Billing. Stripe Billing is a payment gateway and billing solution online. In order to use Servicebot, you need to have a Stripe account, which is free to create.

Servicebot offers 3 main embeddable:

1. Pricing page – able to create great pricing pages that give users the ability to view and select plans they’ve created in Stripe
2. Sign-up forms – able to create great sign-up forms that will allow customers to securely checkout for the things they have purchased
3. Subscription management portal – allows customers to manage their subscription, cancel, update credit card, and download PDFs of their previous invoices. Plus, it reduces customer support requests and reduces customer churn.

Omeda

This module gives the Omeda API a basic Drupal integration. And when combining Omeda and Drupal, you get a great match for managing customer relationships.

Omeda is the leading Audience Relationship Management platform allowing you to acquire, unify, manage & activate your audience data. They offer a very complete and well-documented API, which is key to any good integration.

Right now, there are three Omeda modules available from Drupal:

1. Omeda Module (basic) – this Drupal integration allows you to connect to the Omeda API and allows you to configure basic settings between the two systems.
2. Omeda Subscriptions Module – allows you to push subscription data such as opt-ins/outs from Drupal back to the Omeda audience database. 
3. Omeda Customers Module – enables Drupal’s user data to be synced with Omeda using the Store Customer and Order API.

Picture 6. Omeda & Drupal

CAPTCHA

Spambots filling in e-mail boxes are the problem of many websites. Due to an overcrowded inbox, agents can give less attention to real visitors, and the whole user experience is getting worse. Captcha is a module that poses a question or a task to a site visitor most often within a web form to find out whether he is a human or a robot. The purpose of CAPTCHA is to block spamming submissions, which are automated scripts that publish spam content wherever they can.

The CAPTCHA module provides this feature to almost every user with a web form on Drupal’s site. Its purpose is to block form submissions by spammers, which are automated scripts that post spam content everywhere they can. The CAPTCHA module provides this feature to virtually any user-facing web form on a Drupal site.

Picture 7. CAPTCHA module for Drupal

However, requiring a question can be annoying for human visitors. To void bothering and difficulties with filling an answer, you can make it in a fun way. Through play, you can create an enjoyable form. Creating a simple, almost primitive game CAPTCHA you can make the security check process more user-friendly but still spam-free.

Picture 8. Creative way to make a CAPTCHA

Paldesk

A Drupal module that allows users to implement a live chat plugin on their website. It enables a business owner to get in touch with visitors and customers directly. The conversations take place in real-time, as the module offers widget customization options and a variety of features, like proactive chatbot and a mobile application. Solving customer requests or questions has never been easier, or quicker.

Linking multiple channels to one dashboard makes it easy to respond to multiple site visitors. Paldesk is very easy to integrate with your most popular channels like E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Android, and iOS Applications and your web site.

Some of the features are multi widget support where you set working hours, language, the appearance of live chat to every specific market or web location. You can set working hours for every agent and add a predefined offline message. Paldesk enables creating, managing and resolving tickets as well as assigning them to ideal agents or groups of agents. To make customers get answers faster, you can answer predefined questions and get more done.

Picture 9. Paldesk module for Drupal

Webform

To add a form to a website is definitely not an easy process, but Drupal made it easy through this module. Webform is an interface used for creating forms and surveys and to collect information from users in Drupal. This module also lets us create any kind of form, from simple ones to complicated.

It has so many advantages, from flexibility, clean interface to many great features. Some of them include multi-step forms, statistic collection, data export and many more. And those features can also expand as Webform has a handy API.

CKEditor

CKEditor is a WYSIWYG rich text editor which enables writing content directly inside of web pages or online applications. It is developer-friendly, loads faster and it’s fast as the code has previously been updated. Some notable clients of CKEditor include Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, Disney, Siemens, NBCUniversal – and many more.

This module can enable Drupal to exchange text area fields with the CKEditor 4 – a visual HTML editor. That editor is mostly called a WYSIWYG editor. It brings several of the powerful WYSIWYG editing features of known desktop editors like Word to the web. 

Some of the features of the CKEditor module include support for external file browsers, Linkit support for internal linking, ready to use plugins for tags and many more.

Picture 10. CKEditor Drupal module

Conclusion

Deloitte found out that 62% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator. In fact, two-thirds of the company’s competitive edge is based on the experience they deliver to their customers. Having in mind that customer experience depends a lot about your websites and other online places, remember that a created web site is not a final product. It is needed constant upgrading and adjusting to customers. With many existing options and Drupal modules, you can make it more helpful for yourself and at the same time more user-friendly, and eventually more profitable.