Design for design - How co-designing your admin interface with editors paves the way for better content design and winning user experiences

Empowering editors to design their best content is difficult. Content design may be at the bottom of their to-do list. The admin interface is just another system they have to learn how to use. Published outputs are the end goal. When they can’t publish content the way they want, they settle for less or they go outside the platform.
But what if editors were involved in continually shaping the admin interface? What if their natural workflows informed the set-up? What if instead of hacking features to fix content issues, there was a way to develop something more intuitive to their needs?
In this talk I’ll share how UX work with editors helped the evolution of content design at the University of Edinburgh as we moved from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9. I’ll cover:
- How to find out what editors really want (clue: it’s not what they say they want)
- How to give multiple editors with multiple needs what they need in one interface
- How to introduce UX into the UAT process
- How to position accessibility front and centre in content design
- How to avoid wasted or misused features and tech debt
To conclude, I’ll offer tips and reflections on how designers and developers can communicate better working within a user-centred agile framework and how to deliver sprint after sprint.