My User Experience Week

Last week I had a user experience knowledge update week. I concentrated on listening, watching, and reading on user experience stuff. Here is a short list of content:

• A podcast (presentation at a conference) by Dan Shaffer
• Information Architecture survey results posted by Louis Resenfeld
• Peter Morville’s podcast via IT Conversations
• Steve Krug speaks to developers from Devsource
• Contentology hosts an Accessibility guide that is actually from Dive into Accessibility.

Then on Thursday I attended a networking event with some people from the DC area involved with User Experience, Information Architecture, and Content Management communities.

So you ask yourself why would someone who is more software development inclined be spending so much time on reviewing User Experience content. Answer: I believe that that a poor User Experience is a large reason why IT projects can fail. Failure can be classified in many different ways and where from the product/project being completely dead, to a year after the initial rollout the majority of the users still complain that they don’t know how to use the product.

In the past I’ve been involved with a few content management projects at a variety of levels, and I believe that a large majority of them that failed (although they are still in production) because of poor usability. It is unfortunate that in this day and age that the CM industry allows this usability issue to initiate the demise of well intended projects. Many of the, shall I say most, of the CMS vendors have heard that their product has usability discrepancies but few try and resolve them. I can only imagine that vendors see the usability issues as secondary to the actual software code being to complex, which btw most are. So what are we to do since, most the CMS vendors have horrific user interfaces? I say we start purchasing the software without a UI. Let’s purchase everything but the UI and let’s design and build our own. Although, it feels good to get that off my chest and it out there to you, I realize that this will be nearly impossible because of how much application logic is actually built into the User Interface layer. Step one in cleansing the UI I suggest removing as many menu choices and links where you can in the CMS UI.

Case and Point: I was involved with a project where we concluded that 80% of the UI requests to the content management system were to create and edit the content and a large percentage of the users were only performing these tasks. We were using a CMS that had (and still has) a horrific user interface. So we built a custom application that was used to create new content, review content, edit content, and most of the basic workflow transition tasks. The other 20% of the functionality was used by the publishers or more the power type users of the content system and knew that they could toggle between the two interfaces, if needed, to do their jobs. It didn’t take long for us to build a modified, featureless, but more usable, user interface, and the system became a lot more successful. Unfortunately, for the new interface, it was acceptably too little but it was too late and a $150k CMS implementation was being brought in to replace the $1M CMS implementation. That said the project was not considered a failure because it did get a content management acceptance in a large organization that didn’t want to change.

Complete Enterprise wide IT solution acceptance in any large organization is something fairly unique to accomplish in a single project. However, User Experience and Software Design should not be what hinders that acceptance.