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Most digital projects focus on converting site visitors to customers, providing citizens with information, extending business processes to employees or collaborating with partners. Unfortunately employees are struggling behind the scenes with Web content management systems that are generally difficult to use and frustrating to create content in, cumbersome to administrate and far from easy to develop in.
You can do much to improve the usability of your CMS, but there are also quite a few pitfalls that make it tough to incorporate user experience best practices into your project. Consequently editors and authors are often left with hard-to-use systems that do nothing to improve productivity; in fact often the opposite is the case.
Why is this a problem?
From the onset and all the way during a CMS selection, all vendors will claim that their system is intuitive and easy-to-use. When they say this, what they really say is comparable to when people talk about swimming or riding a bicycle: Easy to do once you've learned how. -Even enjoyable if you do it regularly..! The sales presentations are typically done by a sales engineer who seems to truly be enjoying the system - but try to let your editors loose in the system and you'll see a completely different picture.
The real problem is that most projects do not leave enough time to train editors and then there's the larger problem of digital literacy, e.g. not many on the buyer-side understand the underlying CMS concepts. To the editors, communicators and others producing content for the website, using the CMS is in reality more like going to the dentist than going for a swim. Not always a painless experience. Our group meetings are full of horror stories from regular CMS users with user experience nightmares.
To be fair to vendors, there is no such thing as a "perfect CMS user interface". We may all agree that the iPad is an ingenius device with a clever interface, but content management systems are used for so many different use cases, by very different users, that a one-size-fits-all scenario is utopian. Some vendors, e.g. Sitecore, have cleverly solved this by creating different interfaces for different types of users. The real problem is that most projects don't devote any time to CMS usability and simply adopt the system out-of-the-box without any modifications at all to the CMS interface.
What are your options?
Plan according to your organisation. Implement according to standards
I heard this first from my colleague Sara Redin about 7 years ago and this is still very true today when it comes to achieving a usable CMS. If you take the CMS apart, you can go ahead and make your own richer and more intuitive editorial interface. This may sound very attractive on the face of it, but it may also make an upgrade to a future version very difficult and expensive.
Today many vendors offer tips, guidelines and documentation for tailoring the standard administrative interface, specifically advising on what you can change and what you should not touch at all. To some of our members, CMS customisation simply means using the corporate logo on the login screen to make employees feel home, while others really do take the system apart and go ahead and create their own tailored editorial experience.
If you really want to focus on employee productivity when it comes to CMS, then my recommendation would be that you focus on the top tasks. What are the top tasks employees use the CMS for? Typically creating and editing content. Just like you would for any website, work with a UX designer to design the best flow and then make sure to follow Sara's advise and implement according to standards.
Learn more
At the upcoming J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, we have dedicated conference tracks focusing on both user experience and web content management.
You can also join our CMS Expert groups, where user experience is the main topic at the next meetings.
Read related articles:
- 8 CMS features you are likely never to use which came from a recent CMS Expert group meeting
- 11 usability principles for CMS products by James Robertson
- Improving the Drupal User Experience Case study from The University of Houston Libraries who will also be speaking at in Philadelphia under the headline Therapy for your CMS: Improving the User Experience
- Raising the Bar in CMS Usability with Vaadin; this article by Boris Kraft from Swiss-based open source CMS vendor Magnolia gets technical, but starts out at a higher level
- Top tasks versus tiny tasks by Gerry McGovern