Rahel Bailie of Intentional Design chats about World Usability Day activities—including the World’s Largest Card Sort—with Chip Gettinger on the recently revamped Astoria Software blog. In addition to providing a succinct overview of usability, Bailie discusses why understanding the user experience is critical for information experts, content management professionals, and content management technology vendors alike.
Is usability related to content management? “Absolutely!” Bailie says. “Content management is about usability in two ways. First, the content management system itself has to be usable. The system developers need to understand the mental model of users in order for clients to be able use the system efficiently. Usability testing is critical here, to understand how the system can support business processes, instead of contorting processes to fit the system – which still happens all too often, I might add. Then, the CMS output has to be usable by the front-end users.”
