Thursday, October 07, 2004

Veen Needs IT: Veen's CMS Rant is Dead On

Jefferey Veen is a smart guy. And his comments about open source CMS usability (and, I would add "usefulness") deficits are great. He sets an agenda for open source CMS developers who, by and large, are motivated by what seems to be a genuinely altruistic motive: give publishing power to the people. Trouble is, as Jeff points out, the barrier is just too high right now for most people.

I like everything on Veen's list. And, I am happy that someone is already taking up the challenge. If anyone is still listening, I would add a couple of others. The first one is straightforward, the second one is kind of tricky:

1. Don't Assume that Folks Know Their Way Around the Server: I know, this seems a bit crazy to geeks and wannabes, but the truth is that many people who have legitimate needs for CMS don't understand how a webserver works. They not only don't "got root?", as the t-shirt sez, they also don't know that a "client" isn't a person.

Corrective action for this assumption falls partially into the realm of Veen's request for task-oriented documentation. In my best Technical Writing Teacher voice, I would say it this way: the user's task starts "earlier" than you might imagine, with "Tour your web server," or maybe "Talk with the people who host your web site."

But there are also some technology steps to take on the development side. How about a tool that polls the server to determine what CMS components might already be installed? This could help folks make choices about where they need to begin a CMS installation, who they might need to talk to about it, etc. And how about a system that lets you easily set up the CMS to run on a local host and just as easily move it when you figure out who can set you up with server access? (technically possible for many of the CMS's, I know, but not very easy to do; yes, I know about bloxsom and blojsom).

2. It's fine to use genres as a way to orient users to types of content, but genres are more about what users want to do than how content is structured: Users may want to post news for their organization, but they don't necessarily know about or want to know what the semantic structure of a news story is. So when you help users create a particular genre like a news story, think about what the functional purpose of the genre structures are, and cue users with those.

For example...

news is "new" - this tells us that time-ordered, sequential organization with the most recent item being most prominent is a good default; give users simple language to explain this, e.g. "In the "news" area, items will be listed with the most recently added item at the top. You will need to decide how many items will display in your news area at one time, and how long an item remains on the front page..."

news should travel - by word of mouth, by cut-n-paste, by RSS, whatever. This is why news items typically have headlines and leads. Prompt users as to their function: "The headline and lead paragraph not only introduce your story, they also stand alone in places where youhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifr story is summarized, linked to, or talked about."

news, over time, becomes institutional memory - so details that might seem too obvious to include when a story is breaking may be sorely missed when, looking back after a year or more, someone is charting the history of an initiative. Prompt users to add details to news stories that becomes part of the semantic structure so that these details can serve as index points.

...and I could go on. Don't get me started with genres.

shout outs: thanks Kairos News for pointing the way to this post. Veen's company, adaptive path, is worth a look too.


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home