The university of Minnessota and the University of Baltimore have both done usability studies on Drupal 6. The University of Baltimores study can be downloaded here (found it through Dries Buytaert's blog):

http://groups.drupal.org/files/DrupalUsabilityResearchReport.pdf

Nick Lewis has a few suggestion based on the above study:

http://www.nicklewis.org/node/973 

One of Nick's suggestions is that more buttons be used. I do particularly like the suggestion as it leaves one less click for users who want to save the blog post instead of just publishing it Kudos/+1 to that idea:

http://www.nicklewis.org/node/973#comment-51795 

(The rest of this post is off topic yet related to the title)

The following is a direct quote (with actual images instead of image links) from a post I made on:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10105#comment-34593

In acidfree galleries, having the vertical tabs horizontally laid out above the node content wasn't exactly the best placement.

I re did a theme and inserted vertical tabs to the left of the node content (floating the tabs to the left and the node content to the right with complementary widths.)

The image link displays how vertical tabs can be used to navigate between local tasks (I hope thats what local tasks are) of view and list options in acidfree galleries:

Vertically Tabbed Node Options

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I've recently started theming in Drupal. I've been custom theming in wordpress for clients since about November.

One of my client projects required switching a non phptemplate theme into one that uses the PHPTemplate Engine in wordpress. The PHPTemplate Engine allowed the user to switch the sidebars on and off at will and have the main content region expand and contract according to if there are sidebars or not.

Turning a theme it into a PHPTemplate engine just required transferring a template.php file into the theme. Enabling the features available in the PHPTemplate Engine does require a change to the XHTML structure of a page which includes inserting PHP functions. Not a time consuming task if one already knows where to place the functions in the XHTML structure of a page.

http://drupal.org/node/219584 is the thread

The title probably sounds alien for users new to Drupal so before I explain what the improvement is about, I'll explain what a code patch is in the CMS called Drupal.

In Drupal, (a CMS or more accurately a web construction toolkit) is constantly updated and improved every day. As with most software, a collection of improvements is released as a new version such as Drupal 5.1, Drupal 5.2 etc..

In between each release, the software code in Drupal is improved by creating and then applying what is known as a code patch.

In Drupal 5.6 and Drupal 6.0 when a user goes to a page and clicks a link called configure on the following page:

The theme in use right now is the Barron Theme.

The theme looks so good, I cannot even believe stevejbayer.com is running on Drupal.

The theme can be downloaded from:
http://drupal.org/project/barron

While looking around irc for site building support for http://indiandrupal.com, I got into a conversation about reworking Drupal's Admin system. Wordpress and Joomla seemed much more easy to get started with than Drupal although sticking Drupal leads to a lot more than Wordpress or Joomla have to offer.

One thing led to another and then we started off the following thread about reworking Drupal's Core Administration Interface: http://drupal.org/node/211075

Its about time I brought in my User Experience Architecture Skills into Drupal.org.
http://groups.drupal.org/season-usability
http://groups.drupal.org/usability
are groups I've joined regarding usability on drupal.org The coming days and weeks would tell how far my involvement in Drupal's User Experience would be.