The Content Editor deserves an easy Life

You know the way you design a beautiful website, but the back end edit page is long, and ugly, and hard to follow, and ... well, let's fix that mess so website end users and content editors both have a great user experience.

This presentation is based on a talk I gave recently at Drupal Open Days Ireland 2015 held in the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin. The genesis of the talk came from my observation that web developers often presume that the "end user" of their product is the person who visits the website to make a purchase or perform an action. My contention is that the content editor is the end user of the web developers and the site visitor is the end user of the client. It's not that simple of course, but the bluntness will do to allow us to get the conversation started.

If we accept this theory, then surely we should put as much effort into the user experience (UX) of the content editor as we do into the finished front end of the website. I met with a potential client recently who told me their website (not built on Drupal) is not very good "because it's not updated enough; it's not updated enough because it's hard to use". This organisation is losing money, losing site visitors, losing SEO, and ultimately spending more time publishing to other platforms all because the editor experience is not up to standard for them.

When using Drupal, there are a lot of things we can do (at a theme, module, and conceptual level) to make the editor experience more enjoyable - lots of small things that can in aggregate add up to a much more pleasant user experience for the content editor.

(Though this presentation can apply to any version of Drupal, some of the modules I talk about are not available for Drupal 8 yet.)