Therapy for your CMS: Improving the User Experience

In web design, much of user experience design is focused on the needs and expectations of end-users. However, when developing within an open-source content management system (CMS), it becomes essential to also consider those who will be using the CMS. At the University of Houston Libraries, the Web Services department learned how essential it is to balance usability and functionality when developing a CMS after they really started using and getting feedback on their over-engineered intranet implementation in Drupal. This talk will include lessons learned from our initial mistakes, but focus primarily on the challenges and successes of the CMS built for the Libraries’ website and the methods we used for engaging users to help determine the initial direction for the development of the CMS. Attendees will leave with ideas on how to simultaneously provide flexibility and advanced tools to improve the user experience and apply “therapy” to their own CMS implementations. Background article: Improving the Drupal User Experience, http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4578