J. Boye’s 2009 Arhus conference was a learned and often humorous affair. The biggest lesson I brought back from Denmark was just how far away all of us who work in the industry — website managers, technologists, vendors, consultants — are from having good web content management.
Alas, poor clients
How many people could say that they were happy with their implementation? Even those case studies I saw were tinged with regret at missing features or how long the process took. The conference was littered with people who’d wasted budget and wanted to share their hindsight. And these were the enlightened ones.
The industry protests too much, methinks
But while those of us in the industry can easily put errors down to naïvety, I think it’s time we took a long hard look at ourselves. How can we tell users that CMS is like complex machinery which should involve substantial training and even change management? That’s an appalling attitude to user requirements.
Don’t try to make people change… do something that can’t already be done. (Euan Semple)
When every survey shows usability as the top area of dissatisfaction with CMS, what’s preventing vendors from making a friendlier system? As Seth Gottlieb points out, they’re all as bad as each other.
Slings (and boxes) and arrows
Creating and maintaining content should be simple enough for devolved editorial teams to perform with little training. The tricky thing is creating high quality content to suit an audience’s needs. Yet few CMS will ease editors through this process or evaluate their content against style guides. We’re beginning to see a few technologies in this area, but these are just sold as add-ons to an already bloated feature set.
The play’s the thing
It seems the industry has been blind to the truth. Features are specified but never used. Vendors add functionality so that they can score highly in analyst reports and avoid being excluded from shortlists, but all they’re doing is making it more difficult for users to create a compelling web presence.
To be or not to be
WCM was once a breakthrough in enabling less technical users to publish web content relatively quickly. But has it really progressed in the last few years? I don’t think so. We just have more modules piled onto re-skinned interfaces. Can’t we have friendlier tools for delivering a content strategy? Otherwise WCM will see some other application usurp its role and seduces its client base, which would be a tragedy for the industry.
More on #fixwcm
- Jon Marks, including links to other post on the theme.
- #fixwcm tweets
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Vendors naturally adopt a ‘make what we can sell’ approach so the buck stops ultimately with the customer.
If it doesn’t do what the strategy requires it to do – don’t buy it!
If there isn’t a thought through and achievable strategy then it’s the customer’s own stupid fault!
Comment by James Hoskins — 10 November 2009 @ 10:42 am
Janus,
I completely agree with your view. We have all too easily accepted in the past what vendors offer us to improve usability of their CMS.
With costs under such focus now, having an easy to use CMS that does most things very simply and easily is now the priority.
As you know I’ve blogged about how BT is trying to tackle this so we have a CMS that is as easy to use as sending an email.
Finding a CMS that simple for a global organisation is not easy!
We need to collaborate on our experiences more effectively so others avoid our mistakes and can make better decisions for less time and effort.
How though……………..?
Mark
Comment by Mark Morrell — 10 November 2009 @ 11:29 am
For the latest version of our Web CMS (http://www.amaxus.com), we took the exact opposite approach to most vendors. We discarded all ‘features’, and spent multiple man-years of effort on user-centered-design, resulting in a specification for an interface that was purely focused on allowing users to achieve various CMS tasks. The features then ‘dropped out’ of this.
As with all software, I think we’re still working towards making this a reality (and living up to the expectations we’ve placed on ourselves), but hopefully we’re getting there.
Comment by Dan Zambonini — 10 November 2009 @ 12:16 pm
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