Web design and development by Front, a strategy, design and technology studio in Belfast, Northern Ireland

We’re doing some research into the user experience of content management systems, so if you’ve ever been involved in managing a website, we’d love to get your insight.

Click here to take the short survey!

Why are we doing this?

We believe that every website should get better and better and better over time. Unfortunately, many people find it difficult enough to look after the site they have, rather than getting to focus on continuous improvement.

Almost every site we deliver at Front uses a content management system so that non-technical users can take ownership of the site once its live, so we really care about how easy it is to manage a site once its live.

Key to this is the regular addition of high-quality content. However, too often the design of Content Management Systems don’t reflect the way that those involved in authoring, editing or reviewing content actually work; despite claims to the contrary, almost all CMS tools are designed around how a site works for its users, rather than focusing on the needs of those who’ll be responsible for it once live.

This creates a barrier to publishing good content, and restricts the growth and quality of the site. A better CMS experience should result in better content being created for a site, which in turn results in a better experience for the site’s users.

We’re not the first to think about this. Jeff Veen wrote about the problems inherent in Content Management Systems way back in 2004, but things haven’t changed much since then, and we’d like to get the discussion started again.

So, if you’ve ever been involved in managing a website with a CMS, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Our Research

To make sure we really understand what the key issues are, we’re carrying out a small piece of design research on content management. We want to know how the experience of using a CMS could be improved, and so along with performing user interviews and usability testing, we’ve put together a quick survey to gather input from the broader web community.

We’re doing this research because we realise that while we put a lot of time and attention into creating beautiful online experiences for our client’s users, we perhaps don’t give enough thought to the experience of our clients themselves.

To take part, fill in our quick survey