Improving the CMS User Experience

Paul Rowell, “I’m not a UXer, I’m a developer and site builder who has noticed a lot of things to fix” gave a handy list of tools that he’s accumulated over his experience to improve the CMS authoring experience (not unlike my later talk, but conveniently covering the one area that I explicitly wasn’t doing to look at).

Rowell commented that a lot of them were “little things that help improve the UX” (c’mon, just call them microinteractions like a UXer would). I was happy to see him make a comment about accessibility and that the Media module not only can be customised to allow for multiple uploads but now also properly provides title and alt tags.

His slides are available below:

Speaking of complementary talks, a few people pointed out that Jeni Tehan’s Tasty Backend (which I blogged about last year) was a useful if complementary set of modules, covering some elements that Rowell didn’t include (such as vertical tabs and hiding extra fields). I’m hoping that the two of them join forces!