Reaching out to the lost customer: reshaping AX in D8 on mass.gov

Hundreds of state employees login to mass.gov everyday to update and add content to support the services their department provides for the people of the Commonwealth. Therefore it’s vital that mass.gov have the most up to date and relevant information, and to achieve that outcome it needs to be as frictionless as possible for state employees to add and edit content.

During my time working with the Edit Team at mass.gov, we sought to foster stronger relationships with content creators and editors by dramatically reshaping Drupal 8’s authoring experience (AX). Our goal was not only to make it easier to navigate the admin UI, but also to make the authoring experience more intuitive for state employees who create content for the Commonwealth’s various departments and bureaus. Feedback from state employees was that the vanilla Drupal 8 UI was difficult to use, what they needed to do was hard to find, and there was a steep learning curve.

Attendees of all backgrounds, will see examples of a reshaped AX, including why we did this, why making an admin theme tricky, how we did it (including user testing), and some of our thoughts for the future.