How usable is your Content Management System?

— Published April 16th, 2004  |  by David Moore

You're a large organisation, with disparate departments and a need for a regular amount of new content for the website.

Decentralising content creation is the obvious solution and to support this, your IT department have invested in an expensive content management system (CMS) to allow people in each area to enter and approve content for the site.

But no-one's using it and you're not sure why. It might be too late to ask this, but did anyone check the usability of the CMS?

The CMS needs to be very easy for non-technical people to use if your decentralisation plans are to work, but most often, these are the last people to be consulted in the purchase and implementation of a CMS system. The result can be confusion and limited use of a system that was supposed to empower people.

To prevent this, here are a few steps we recommend.

1) Involve end-users from the beginning

Managers and IT people often end up choosing a CMS, but they won't be the ones using it, and often won't know what the most important issues are for those at the sharp end. As part of the requirements gathering process, conduct stakeholder interviews and if possible, observe people doing their jobs to get a sense of what they need from the CMS. What level of computer competency to people have? Are they writing new material from scratch for the site, or are they working from existing content in another format?

Also, co-opt some of these users into the purchasing process - they'll be able to tell you if the systems you're looking at will make sense to the ordinary people in your organisation.

2) Buy on tasks not features

When you've narrowed down your shortlist of CMS vendors, ask them to show you how their system handles everyday tasks - devise a realistic scenario that someone in your organisation would have to perform regularly. Get each vendor to show you exactly how it would be done. Assess the usability of the system (perhaps using our suggested criteria from January's feature).

Another useful resource is the CMS usability checklist from Kitsite.

Vendors love to sell you features - 'our system can do this, and supports this whizz-bang technology'. But most of want you want a CMS to do is pretty simple, and the better it performs these core functions from a usability perspective, the more people will use it.

3) Devise a workflow that suits you

Most CMSs support some form of workflow, where creating each piece of content is broken down into discrete steps to allow for approval cycles and reviews. You should already have these processes in place before the CMS arrives - they might be only paper based, or run from a simple spreadsheet, but they should be the workflow that suits your organisation.

For example, financial firms often need to build in a legal and regulatory review of all content before it goes live to the site. Having the final editorial pass for grammar and style after this step makes no sense as all the copy will have to be reviewed again.

The CMS should be flexible enough to reflect your existing workflow, so your users are following the same processes as before, albeit in a different environment.

4) Check for accessibility

The finished pages the visitors to the site actually see often fail to meet accessibility requirements without careful work. But it's also worth checking to see if the back-end is accessible to users with disabilities, especially in a large organisation. Otherwise yo could be left with a system that a proportion of your employees can't use.

5) Train the users

One thing we've seen work well is to offer some hands-on training for contributors once the system is installed. Ideally this should be done by someone from a training background, as just knowing the system isn't enough to teach it effectively. Providing checklists, manuals and supporting material also helps.

This might also be a good time to offer some training on the less technical side of creating content for the site. Best-practice writing tips and an introduction to the organisation's styelguide (you do have a styleguide, don't you?) can help make sure the content being written is of a good quality.

Choosing a CMS is a complex process, but keeping focused on the people who will be using it every day should ensure that you don't end up purchasing a white elephant.

David Moore