Content vs presentation

One of the most frequently cited aims of CMS is to separate content from presentation. That way we enable content reuse across multiple channels, allow for redesign, etc. It’s one of the core features that any CMS has to provide to be considered a CMS at all, and not just a web page editing system.

But, just because we have to separate these two, it doesn’t mean we have to separate them at birth. It’s been said that being “too difficult to use” is the single biggest reason for the failure of content management projects (45% of failing projects according to one survey). There are various reasons for this, but here’s one:

Mental models are a concept from interaction design. A mental model is an end user’s (perhaps naive) idea of how a system works. The user thinks their contacts app is something like a physical address book, except magically embedded in their computer. Mental models often resort to magic, and why not? This is true for most of us in domains that are not our day jobs; personally, I can offer no coherent non-magical explanation for how my iPhone works.

Of course, the underlying implementation might work in quite a different way; in fact, it’s likely to. That contacts data is really a bunch of rows in a database; that’s the implementation model. Finally, there’s the way that the software presents whats going on to the user on their computer screen: this is the representation model.

Good interaction design favours the mental model over the implementation model; it hides the complexity of the underlying implementation, and as much as possible presents an interface that conforms with the user’s expectations. This is part of what we mean when we say a UX design is “intuitive” – that it conforms to the mental model. More work for the developer, sure, but less for the end user.

Now, let’s think about the mental model for WCM. Generally, the user has this idea that the CMS is a kind of box stuffed with web pages. A web page is a document containing a mix of text, pictures, links etc – a lot like a Word doc. A typical goal will be to edit a bit of text on a page.

One way to tackle this is to expose the implementation model in a web form (or series of forms, depending on the complexity of the implementation) which is effectively an edit mask for the database tables where the web content really lives. You can “educate” the user to understand and use this kind of system.

But why would you? It’s not the author’s job to understand database structures. In most cases I’d say it’s better to provide a WYSIWYG interface that lets users make the edit “in situ”, just as if their web page was a Word doc. This gives a much better approximation to the mental model. Then, behind the scenes the CMS can disassemble the edited content into all the correct boxes, keeping it cleanly separated from the presentation, and stripping out any truly evil presentational gubbins.

But what if this content is being channelled to more than one format? Well, in the real world there is normally a primary channel, and I bet the mental model says that content is being “copied” from that to other channels (eg. from the website to the mobile site). So the CMS can give a preview of the other channels, even an editable preview if there’s an option to override bits of content for other channels (though good luck with resourcing that kind of workflow) without disrupting the model.

Filed under: General , cms, wcm, usability, interaction design

Hey everybody, let’s #fixwcm right now!

So Jon Marks had the idea of crowdsourcing material for his panel discussion at the J. Boye conference, by asking for tweets with the hashtag #fixwcm. It would be an uncharitable soul who’d suggest this was mere laziness – but whatever! It provoked a strong reaction, with hundreds of well-made points and passionate opinions (and no doubt more to come). I’d like to pick out a few tweets to comment on here in a little more than 140 characters.

justincormack First off too many vendors cannot be sustainable

Probably true, though it’s been probably true for a long time. Somehow the great winnowing never quite seems to happen. I think this is largely because WCM is such a big, fuzzy domain that covers a huge range of different scenarios.

@HammerToe: WCM vendors add features to justify license fee; Lather, rinse, repeat. Need to break cycle. OSS breaks that cycle.

Afraid not. Open-source developers have to buy attention and mindshare to boost adoption, and they sell features to do that. New features get attention, whether or not money changes hands. Take a look at CMSWire for many examples.

tednyberg Implementer should be selected based on chosen CMS, not the other way around. Vendors: stay away from implementing!

A few people offered vendors this advice. I sort of agree that the vendor is not necessarily the right party to do implementation. The fly in the ointment is that product designers need to be close to end users, if we’re really going to solve WCM’s endemic usability problems. But as Peter Monks points out, having your vendor do implementations doesn’t necessarily make that happen, especially if there’s a sales/services team sitting between the product devs and the customer.

benmorrisuk We need fewer tick-box style RFPs that fail to prioritise requirements and encourage boiler-plate functionality from vendors

sliewehr … the RFP checklist paradigm is a *result* of the #WCM vendors’ sales process. Live by sword, die by it

I don’t think vendors can take the blame for mind-numbing checklists. If you’re parachuted into the “select a new CMS” job at your business, the easy/lazy thing to do is is download an RFP from somewhere and chop it around a bit. Much easier than doing real analysis of your business needs, and at least it will help you winnow out some vendors from that very large pool of possibles. How about if agencies and vendors boycotted the damn things? I’ll do it if everybody else does…

adrianmateljan Are the likes of @cmswatch diverting us from the real implementation issues? Perhaps #agencywatch would be more appropriate?

I’m sure Adrian knows CMS Watch are on the ball with analysing needs rather than software. But I’d certainly agree that resolving these issues is more a job for agencies than vendors: agencies are building solutions; vendors are selling tools to implement those solutions. Come on, agency guys! Do your bit!

sliewehr @HammerToe Ah, the $1m question…A: Stop selling features / function and start selling value. Make the selling process educational.

“Make the selling process educational”, that’s a useful thought. Without consciously setting out to do it, I’ve generally found customers very receptive to some element of education (in a non-electrode kind of way) during the sales process.

s2d_jamesr I would like CMS vendors to spend a few days with actual authors using their product, to really understand needs

You mean “understand pain” really, don’t you? But more than a few days! Vendors need to see how actual authors use their product continuously. Somehow. The advent of better user experience monitoring tools might be part of the answer here.

scroisier IS WCM all about (intelligent?) aggregation and rendering of content or should it also covers Social Collaboration tools

Good question. Your best advocates aren’t even on your payroll, they’re your customers and partners, and the content they generate can be some of the most valuable. Plus everybody is anyway generating content in other apps (like Twitter or WordPress, eg. for this discussion). So federating all that looks like an increasingly important part of the puzzle.

One thing does seem clear from this exercise: a lot of people who work in this industry think WCM is broken and needs fixing. Which brings us back to Justin’s point: there are too many vendors because it seems like there is (still!) opportunity in this market to (finally!) do it right.

Filed under: General , cms, wcm, fixwcm

CMS and the innovator’s dilemma

At the recent StackOverflow DevDay in London, Joel Spolsky talked about whether your product design should favour simplicity or features, continuing a simmering debate he’s been having with 37 Signals. Spolsky wouldn’t disagree that simplicity is generally better for user experience. But – and it’s a big but – he argues that features are better for revenue. His experience is that customers buy features: whenever they release more features for FogBugz, they see sales go up. More features help protect revenue, not least because you can upsell to existing customers.

This made me think about the trend for CMS vendors away from loosely coupled solutions and towards big all-singing, all-dancing suites, which are competing on essentially the same feature set. The CMS market (at least at the ECM end) now looks like classic innovator’s dilemma territory. Briefly, the innovator’s dilemma is that successful innovation-based businesses usually got to be that way by listening to their customers. When a new innovation comes along, it’s typically only better in some specific way, fitting some edge case; a worse is better solution. For the vendor, the profit margins on the new thing are worse than for the existing business, and the existing customers don’t even want it. So it’s hard to justify putting resources into addressing this new thing. By the time you (and your customers) realise you do need to do something about it after all, it’s too late. Some startup business has captured the new market.

In the CMS world, WordPress are the obvious threat here. Other vendors might scoff and say “it’s not even CMS!”. Well, no. Quite. That should set your innovator’s dilemma alarm jangling. There’s an “edge case” problem that WordPress solves rather well: instant-on deployment. As the web gears up for real-time, that starts to seem less and less of an edge case. Also check out page.ly (when their servers are up – a kind of frontend for building business sites on WordPress.

Box.net is another contender. No, it’s not really a CMS either, just a content repository. But a very extensible, web-oriented content repository. Hey, we shouldn’t even write off Google Sites, even though it’s crap. Maybe sometimes crap is better.

I’m sceptical of the suite approach. It doesn’t even fit the facts on the ground: your staff are already using other tools outside your firewall to contribute and curate content about your business: get over it. A loosely coupled solution that connects people (in and outside the business), content (wherever it lives), and apps (that are already in use anyway; that are “best-of-breed”); now, that looks like a better idea.

Filed under: General , cms, future, innovation, wordpress

Another blog about content management

I’m going to use this new blog to talk mostly about web content management, and a little bit about interaction design. (If you’re actually interested in where I’ve been on holiday, what books I’ve read recently, which bands I’ve seen, or what leftish Euro political views I espouse, you can always check those things out here.)

Web content management is a field I’ve been working in for 10 years now, initially as a developer at guardian.co.uk, more recently as product and interaction designer at Kitsite.  A decade might seem a long time to be plugging away in one category of software, but in many ways WCM is more interesting now than it has ever been. That’s because it sits at the intersection of the web and the workplace, and both are undergoing fundamental change.

The web’s becoming more social, open, and (finally) mobile. While the workplace is becoming more agile, personal, and distributed. For business, these trends mean the boundaries between what’s inside your company and what’s outside have become more permeable. At the same time, the advancing capabilities of web browsers and spread of broadband mean that it’s possible to deliver richer web-based user experiences.

This all has a huge impact on WCM and will I think create a lot of new opportunities for what until fairly recently seemed a moribund field. After a decade of seeing content management platforms converge in functionality, the game has got exciting again. Hurrah!

Filed under: General , cms, wcm