Talking about CMS User Experience, we usually start by identifying factors for your primary audience: your clients. We ignore the back-end user: editors, authors or content strategists.
Following a logic way of thinking, if the back-end user is facing a bad experience handling content using a CMS, you should not expect a better user experience for your customer. The front-end user always consumes the content created, edited and updated by your CMS back-end users.
Based on the above, discussing the back-end user experience is the right starting point to achieve a better customer experience. This starting point will lead to achieve your business goal. Nowadays, the Omni-channel approach starts to dominate Digital Marketing strategies. Omni-Channel is user-focused not channel focused. Furthermore, the Omni-channel approach is a more comprehensive but also a complex system, because it merges all channels in one network with the user-centered for better overall user experience.
Five keys that will help to improve editors experience using a CMS:
– Collaboration: The IT department should not be the only one responsible for the selection of the right CMS. This decision should be taken by all persons eventually involved such as marketers, sales, editors or authors.
– Flexibility: Set up your back-end as an easy, user friendly framework where editing content will be an enjoyable task.
– Automation: Use the maximum from your IT department to let them automate the handling process of repeated and regular tasks.
– Training: Provide comprehensive and regular training for your editors to enhance their capabilities on how to use your Content Management System. On the other hand, you should get feedback from them about current features and challenges to improve further.
– Support: Do not expect that Authors or Editors have the necessary technical background on how to solve HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images manipulation, etc… The IT team should be very supportive to handle such non-content matters, so they only focus on managing the content.
– Workflows: Content Workflows should be as simple as possible to avoid confusion and delays. It should be as simple to explain in 3 or 4 steps. For example Draft creation, revision, approval and publishing.
To conclude, content editors are users too. CMS User Interface (UI) designers need to take this fact into consideration. A bad editing experience will negatively affect your primary front-end audience experience: Your Customers. Also, friendly back-end will lead to less support costs and time.
Please feel free to Contact Me for an open discussion!