Authors Are People, Too!
Download slides with notes at http://tinyurl.com/uad10 If content is king, and user experience is crucial, what can we say about the experiences of people who author content? What makes a good authoring experience, why should I care, and how can I improve my authors’ experience with the CMS? The fundamental purpose of a CMS is to empower us to create and manage Web content. Good user experience should start with the people who are responsible for using this system to work with content. If the process for authoring and editing content in the CMS is cumbersome, authors won’t be actively engaged in maintaining it, they will take shortcuts, they will forget how to use the system, and our sites will be woefully out-of-date. Good authoring experience (AX) will make the CMS easier to learn and easier to use, increasing the likelihood that authors will take a more active role in creating content. Active authors do not require excessive post-training support and keep content up-to-date. CMS’s should be tailored to their authors, not the other way around. This session will provide experiences and lessons learned as I have worked in various roles to improve the CMS authoring environment and empower our authors.
