We have seen specifications for a multitude of CMS websites. Many of them list exhaustive features. Sometimes we get the feeling the authors found the specifications of every single content management system they could lay their hands on and compiled their properties into one giant requirement set! Is this an intelligent decision? Perhaps the famous English mathematician, Alan Turing, can help us answer that question.
Alan Turing described the Turing test in a 1950 paper. Turing was interested in how a computer would have to perform if it was to be called artificially intelligent. He suggested a test where a human judge engages in a conversation with two other parties. One is human and the other a machine. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to have passed the test.
Here at Yart we have a similar test to determine whether a content management system is usable. Can you guess what the single most important feature it should have is? Here's the Yart CMS intelligence test:
Grab your nearest co-worker and show him a page on a website that has an image on it. Then ask him to log in to the CMS and, without giving him any help at all, ask him to change the image to another picture of smaller size.
This task, apparently so trivial, can be stupefyingly difficult with many $10,000 plus CMS systems. You have to select an image, upload it to a folder on the website, resize the image, select its colour adjustments and so on. There’s just too many things the user has to do to have a reasonable chance of getting it right. And even if the user manages to poke around and get the upload working, there’s still the possibility that the upload will wreck the site’s layout by changing the underlying HTML.
What about if we train our users to use the CMS properly. Won’t that solve the problem? The problem with training is that users forget it fast. Websites don’t always change that often so trained website CMS users can often forget what they were taught. And even if your company has a trained CMS guru there’s the possibility they may leave that role and the company will be left without an editor.
The reason for the usability problem is not because these expensive CMS systems are poorly designed. It’s because many content management systems confuse the role of site building with site editing. Site building is a complex technical process. It requires laying out HTML, adjusting images, defining content and so on. Site designers are IT professionals who can cope with the options of image resizing and adjusting underlying technical code. But site editors shouldn’t have to think about it. Unfortunately, they often have to if the wrong CMS is chosen.
Our CMS solves this issue by providing a paragraph based model of content editing. It's one of our most commonly used content types and something we will talk about in an upcoming article.