Applying Usability Principles to Your CMS

Usability has moved to the forefront in the past few years, especially for corporate Web sites, as marketing managers seek to understand and measure whether their investments in Web communications are really paying off. Now that Web-based applications have proliferated, enterprises are beginning to look more closely at application usability in general and the usability of content management systems in particular.

User-centered design means more than working on graphical interfaces. A UCD approach says that everyone working on the project should understand the needs of users and feed those back into all design decisions, including technical design. A UCD process should ultimately define who the users are ("personas") and then capture work patterns and how they would use a CMS ("scenarios"). UCD is "not an occupation, but an approach," says Steve Krug, a usability consultant and author of Don't Make Me Think, "so I encourage people to go ahead and practice it without a license."

The key is to watch people actually employing the system. "If you think you know how other people think, you're probably wrong," counsels Krug. This implies avoiding hard and fast rules. "People designing applications are looking for rules, but practitioners know that it is situational: you could install the right widget, but if it's not prominent enough, it won't work."