I’ve seen a lot of bad CMSs. Systems that take multiple steps and six different screens to publish and categorize a page. In-page editing that looks completely different once it’s published. And my favorite was a previous client (I led a project redesigning the intranet for a state’s judiciary department) who had an employee that spent an entire day updating and distributing their daily newsletter because the formatting tool was so buggy. That’s basically all she did all day, every day. Poor thing.
Clients notice these things as well. It’s actually an oft-heard sidebar complaint during project discovery: “My current CMS sucks.” That’s often because content management systems are developed with “features” in mind, rather than focusing on the usability of the application.
Good usability is just as important for the CMS as it is for the site that it powers. We spend countless hours designing optimized sites for our client’s target audiences, but we often overlook optimizing the thing our client will use the most—the actual CMS. Even if a CMS provides every snippet of required functionality, if it’s not easy to use, the project can be deemed a failure by the people who use it day in and day out.
While there are different levels of “CMS suckage,” there are certainly commonalties across platforms that contribute to poor usability. Here are a few things we can do to improve the CMS experience for our clients.
1. Make usability part of the selection criteria
In addition to a laundry list of technical and implementation specifications, we should be evaluating potential CMS candidates on their usability as well. And if they don’t fit the bill out of the box, take a look at how flexible the framework is so that we can customize and optimize the user experience during deployment.
2. Identify common tasks and make them easily accessible
Take the most accessed content and make it easy to interact with. For instance, if the client will be changing featured content on a weekly basis, make this content easily accessible from the dashboard. After a large-scale redesign of a city’s main tourism site, my team spent some time customizing the WordPress interface to ensure it was easy for the content manager to feature content throughout the site. Rather than having him go into each individual piece of content and select/unselect whether to feature it, we created a new section in the CMS where he could designate content to feature, the order in which it should appear, the click-through links and imagery attached to that featured content.
Once the updates were finished, he called to personally thank me for “saving his life” with this simple improvement. For someone who accesses the CMS several times a day, the efficiency improvement made a huge impact to his satisfaction with the entire system—and consequently, his viewpoint on the success of the project as a whole.
3. Use plain English for naming conventions
Wherever possible, call things what they are rather than using developer-speak to identify inputs and fields. Often field labels are carried over from the source code, resulting in confusing or ambiguous labels like “Name_ID” rather than “First Name.” Also, talk to the client and discover if they have certain terminology they use within the organization that you can take advantage of. Perhaps “tags” is a more common term than “metadata.” If they call their blog “News,” then label that section “News” in the CMS. By labeling things appropriately, you take out a lot of guesswork and training time, which makes everyone happy.
4. Hide stuff users don’t need
Most CMSs have user security built in. Use it to hide the pieces of the CMS the user doesn’t have access to. If a user group only has access to edit and add pages for a certain department of the organization, for example, then hide all the pages for the other departments (rather than displaying an error or “no access” message when clicked). There is no use cluttering the CMS with components the user can’t actually use.
5. Format the formatting tools
Just because there is a WYSIWYG editor doesn’t mean that formatting issues are magically resolved. Once heading styles, bullet points and other formatted elements are defined in the design, make sure the text editor matches those styles. Nothing frustrates a CMS user more than having to edit the HTML code of a WYSIWYG editor because the default styles aren’t correct. It’s also extremely helpful to implement short codes for commonly used, highly stylized content elements like calls to action or pull quotes.
Of course every CMS is different and comes with its own limitations on customization, etc. But even approaching the CMS as something that needs to be “designed” and thought through is a huge step in the right direction to ensuring clients (the ones who use the CMS every day, not just the ones who sign the checks) are satisfied at the end of the project.
