The Convincing Case for Author Experience

Review of Rick Yagodich's AX Book

I've just finished reading 'Author Experience' by Rick Yagodich, a book I had been looking forward to. Its subtitle immediately triggered my curiosity: “Bridging the gap between people and technology in content management”. My high expectations have certainly been met.

The author argues convincingly in favour of a new kind of content management system that can make the inherently complex management task of adaptive content feel doable to any author. Rick pictures a whole new discipline devoted solely to this purpose: creating an excellent Author Experience.

Take-aways

I’ll start with my take-aways from the book, some of which I will dive into a little deeper:

• Adaptive content requires a new kind of tool. Structured and semantically rich content demands a new paradigm. ‘What you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) becomes ‘What you see is marked-up content (WYSIMUC)’. The CMS interface of the future is forms-based and relies heavily on search.
• Developing an author-friendly CMS fit for adaptive content management is a huge investment, but it will definitely pay off. As a community, including our clients, we need to push vendors more to move into this direction.
• We have to accept that a CMS fit for adaptive content management feels unnatural in some respects. Authors can no longer predict through what channel or in what context their content will appear. Rich-text editing and device-specific previews are remnants of Print.
• User-centered design should go together with business-centered design. The systems that are used to create appealing content should appeal to the authors. UX is about making things enjoyable, AX is about efficiency and appropriateness.
• A CMS should never force a paradigm upon the authors that was invented for development purposes. What works best for developers isn't always best for authors. In general content managers should have a much larger influence on CMS development.
• Content management systems can be much more helpful in empowering authors to clean up the mess that is a natural part of it. Well-designed systems can also do a much better job in hiding complexity.
• A process that does not work in real life can never be implemented successfully in a CMS. Reducing workflow to an approval process is a denial of the complexity involved in the information lifecycle.

Semantic and structured (beyond buzzwords)

It is no coincidence Noz Urbina, champion of structured content, wrote the foreword. Like Noz, Rick consistently argues structured, semantically rich content is the way to go for modern businesses. But he also explains what kind of content management systems is needed to achieve this admittedly complex goal.

Only semantically rich content, garnished with metadata can possibly feed the information needs of all our audiences across all the channels they choose to use. Managing complex, semantically rich content requires new tools. These tools must be able to handle semantic, structured content and translate that structure to interfaces that make sense to authors. Technology must do what it is supposed to: facilitate human tasks, carry out the burdensome computation, and hide the complexity.

User-centered and business-centered

Karen McGrane is famous for stating CMS is the software UX forgot. Although Rick indeed argues the needs of the users, case in point authors, should be continuously taken into account, he distinguishes between UX and AX for good reason.

While UX is about making tasks seem effortless, maybe even fun, content authoring is never fun and doesn’t need to be. It is a job, a task. So working in a CMS does not need to be enjoyable; it needs to be efficient, logical, and appropriate to the task.

Defining AX

Quoting Rick directly,

Author experience, as a discipline, is the provision of contextually appropriate functionality within a content management environment. AX focuses on the value of managing the communication process effectively and efficiently. It deals with this process from the point of view of those who create and manage content. Author experience looks to remove the inconsistencies and cognitive hurdles that make it harder than necessary to work with content management systems.

AX needs

To me, the core of the book is Chapter 5 entitled 'Hierarchy of Author Experience Needs' in which Rick introduces a Maslow's pyramid of author experience needs. I’ll name them bottom-up illustrating each one with a couple of examples.

1 Fit-for-purpose language

Terminology used in the CMS's interface must match the author's mental model, not the developer’s. Terms should be used consistently throughout the system, reducing the learning curve. Content should not be associated through a hard link (the simplest technical approach to a complex problem); the correct tool is reference metadata: attributes that establish subject affinity.

2 Content accessibility

Rick distinguishes between four models for accessing stored content. Structured, semantically rich content requires something the author calls 'dynamic multi-axis content filtering'. It's an interface where the author relies heavily on search.

Crucially, after entering a search value, the system offers only filters that are valid in the context of that search value. '2012' may for example refer to the year in which content was published, the 'London 2012' tag associated with a piece of content, or perhaps the user is searching for instances of '2012' in the body text of an article.

3 Associative structured content

Because authors of structured content cannot know the context where their material will be consumed, or know the platform it will be delivered to, they should be rejected certain flexibility, such as WYSIWYG toolboxes.

They need to be replaced by WYSIMUC (what you see is marked-up content) where an author indicates the semantic function of emphasis, rather than 'bold' or 'italic'. Similarly when creating a list, an author doesn't simply choose a bulleted or numbered list, but should also identify the type of list, for example a list of ingredients or steps in a process.

Paradoxically the better structured the content, the free-er it becomes. Take images for example. Rather than treating an image as something that belongs between paragraphs, we associate the image with a block (as metadata), allowing us to display it based on the platform and channel by simple rules.

4 Rules-based presentation

There is no predefined way of displaying semantically structured content, no default rendering. And this is a good thing. As a consequence, the input model for structured content is going to be predominantly forms-based. NPR’s COPE is an example. (Rick is quick to admit the authoring interface leaves room for improvement, but he is more interested in the innovative paradigm.)

5 Content management tools

Tree views are a pain because they fail to show dynamic associations. Dynamic, rules-based references are invaluable in the governance of large information sets. They allow author-relevance considerations to be added to multi-axis content filtering.

Reducing workflow to an approval model within the CMS is an oversimplification. Not only should the approval model “work” outside of the CMS (it’s about humans interacting); we need to track how information transforms between audience versions at a much more abstract scale.

6 Self-aware content

Any content editor who has been involved in a migration knows about orphans. Little pieces of content that are no longer used or referenced anywhere. A useful CMS should recognize content becoming orphaned and trigger a process to clean up the mess.

Human factors

Some of the demands to future-ready, customer-friendly content go against our intuitions as human beings.

Every organization demands personalized communication, but we can never create a manageable set of message variants. Partly because there are simply too many of them, but also because we inherently do not trust a computer with this human task.

Similarly, every organization wants information that flows and adapts (multidevice, omnichannel, anyone?), but we have to let go of presentation control to allow it to do so. This flies in the face of human nature.

The devil’s in the implementation

Sometimes technology is blamed too easily. The same system framed in a different way can make a huge difference.

Take the example of mandatory fields. “Mandatory fields are a burden, optional fields are ignored,” sounds awfully familiar. Rick sees this as an oversimplification resulting from bad implementations where empty mandatory fields stop content from being edited and saved.

In a correct implementation the mandatory field should be populated before the content moves into the next phase of the governance lifecycle. Mandatory should not feel as a burden, because they are mandatory for a good (UX) reason.

What’s next for AX

As far as Rick is concerned, Author Experience is a blossoming professional field for years to come. This suits him well being an AX consultant himself ;) But everyone needs to play ball if we want to achieve the goal of author-friendly adaptive-content management systems:

• Clients need to have a much better idea of how information is managed throughout its lifecycle and include this in CMS selection projects.
• Vendors need to move beyond feature checklists to really adapting a CMS to the client’s needs, including adapting to their content management paradigms.
• Content management practitioners need to make the case for AX, but also be patient. It will take several years before CMSes include features and functionality aimed specifically at making the management aspect of the content lifecycle better.

It’ll be worth the effort and/or worth the wait! Reading Author Experience gives any of these three target audiences a head start.