Authors Are People, Too!

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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forget how to use the system, and our sites will be woefully out-of-date.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.