Empowering editors to design their best content

By Janus Boye

Emma Horrell is User Experience Manager at the University of Edinburgh

Empowering editors to design their best content is difficult. Content design may be at the bottom of their to-do list. The CMS is just another system they have to learn how to use. Published outputs are the end goal. When they can’t publish content the way they want, they settle for less or they go outside the platform.

But what if editors were involved in continually shaping the CMS? What if their natural workflows informed the set-up? What if instead of hacking features to fix content issues, there was a way to develop something more intuitive to their needs?

In a recent member's call we were joined by Emma Horrell, User Experience Manager at the University of Edinburgh who shared how UX work with editors helped the evolution of content design. As she said in the call:

“It’s the words people are interested in”

We started at the beginning: Why is the editor experience so important?

Reimagining the CMS - A CMS supporting UX and content design

As anyone who’s working with publishing content on websites has experienced, it’s often a love-hate relationship with the publishing tool. Content management systems have come a long way in the past 20 years, but as Emma illustrated with her slide as shown below, we still have quite some way to go to make editors happy.

It’s hard to remember everything, the systems has various illogical constraints and the list goes on. To empower the people who are working with content on the website, you also need to take their requirements into account

To be fair to the vendors, I’ve yet to meet a vendor who recommends any sizable organisation to just use their interface as-is, but unfortunately with pressed deadlines and budgets, customising the editorial experience tends to end low on the list of priorities in many projects.

At the University of Edinburgh they have a complex digital estate catering to their 45,000 students and 15,000 staff. With a devolved publishing model, over 8 million webpages and some 300+ editors, they started working on this initiative to better meet the requirements of the editors as a part of their upgrade from open source CMS Drupal version 7 to version 9.

Specifically Emma listed these high-level goals for the project:

  • Engage editors

  • Support devolved editors

  • Evolve editor experience

More specifically, they also wanted to:

  • Give multiple editors with multiple needs what they need in one interface

  • Position accessibility front and centre in content design

  • Avoid wasted or misused features and tech debt

As a starting point, they looked at the typical publishing process as illustrated below.

Content comes as input from the left and then through the mechanics of the CMS, it’s output as webpages

How would this be different if it was shaped by editors?

Co-designing with editors

So, how do you find out what the editors really want in a large, complex and old organisation? As she said on one of her slides: It’s not what they say they want.

It’s all about making better content. Emma showed this slide to illustrate how editor actions are connected with the underlying content management system

Emma mentioned a few different techniques she used along the journey to understand the underlying needs:

  • Outreach with a top tasks survey (inspired by Gerry McGovern). The question to the editors could be phrased like this: “From a list of all possible tasks, pick 5 most important to you”

  • Active listening, where she observed their natural workflows and learned their hacks (and the reasons behind them)

  • Open channels for feedback. Emma shared prototypes along the way, encouraged sense-making and released test environments

  • Mental model maps - for their workflows, so that they could fully understand the space they work in. Eg. creating a page about a course

Features are only part of the solution toolkit, it’s also about editor empowerment, configuration and then perhaps some changes to the CMS, in this case Drupal.

A key learning early on was to resist the urge to define features, even when editors asked for them. Here’s a few memorable examples of this:

  • Could we paste images in as well as text?

  • Carousels would be great

  • Different button styles to make things stand out components for our site?

  • Accordions to fit more content in

  • A body text editor which you can paste components in to

Emma summarised it well with this memorable quote:

“The success of solutions relies on editor behaviour”

So what did they do at the University of Edinburgh?

Making content production better

As Emma stated:

A reimagined editor-focussed CMS is built with, not for the editors

Another way to look at the classical editorial flow - in this one workflows and layouts flow back as ideas and mechanisms to improve the editorial experience.

Specifically at the University of Edinburgh, it also came down to budgets and deadlines. Emma shared how they have prioritised solutions that complement each other, as illustrated below.

On the long list of features to improve content production, they decided to prioritise:

  • Solutions geared to editor workflows

  • Driven by editor needs

  • Editors invested in development

And also those not wholly reliant on configuration as they carried less risk of technical debt and thus more sustainable longer-term.

It was also important to them to look for common ground between developers and designers. This meant investing time in learning from each other, including the occasional pictures and drawings to make sure they were on the same page.

Summarising the project, Emma shared:

  • Co-design starts with relationships: Real life user stories/mental models open opportunities for co-design

  • Features are only one part of the solution: Supporting and empowering editor behaviour underpins success

  • Design and development in agile: Acknowledge differences and look for common ground

Interested in taking a look at how far they have come? Emma kindly shared this 5-minute University of Edinburgh editorial interface demo.

Learn more about improving content production

Emma had some good resources on her final slide, including a few books:

Here’s a few more posts on the topic:

The conversation on better content production and editor empowerment naturally continues in our peer groups and at our conferences. You can meet Emma at HE Connect 24 in September in Leeds.

Finally, Emma reused slides (PDF) from DrupalCon, but if you lean back and enjoy the recording, you’ll find that she added some recent lessons learned.