Read it and weep: Greg Dunlap's new book on content authoring experiences is a treasure

So… how do you feel about your CMS? Do you love it? Do you hate it?

I know, I know. It's a complicated question. Most of us would probably say it's a little of both. 

There are loyalists out there, to be sure – hardcore fanatics who find little fault in their CMS stars. Others had a platform thrust upon them by their organization with no input whatsoever. They're usually not as chipper.

Let's be brutally honest: Our list of grievances is probably longer than we think. Even the most enthusiastic users have big, fat, relevant gripes. And it's often less about the CMS as a whole and more about specific features (or lack thereof).

Why is that the case? 

The answer, of course, is quite simple: We haven't been engaging content authors as co-conspirators in the design process. More often than not, they've been locked out of the room, with no seat at the product development table. That's reason enough to build some animus. 

Of course, this phenomenon isn't new. Software vendors have a long history of making choices that don't always land with users. You know what it feels like to have a UI radically change in an update, accompanied by a disclaimer that it's now “easier to use." Meanwhile, a key function you previously relied on has gone missing (I'm not naming names, Adobe) and you're left trying to cope with a new reality.

There's an important word in all of this melee: Compromise. No one gets everything they want, whether you're an organization evaluating a CMS or a user with a wish list of cool stuff. So we put up. We adapt. As Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

In this composable, hyper-connected era, choice is becoming more abundant – which can be a blessing and a curse. I recently waxed about new solutions that enable users to publish through their CMS directly from Word or Google Docs, allowing for greater collaboration or better alignment around internal systems. But what if CMS editing experiences were better tuned to authors' needs? Would they fully embrace those tools from the first keystroke? 

For what it's worth, I think CMSes have improved their capabilities, particularly as vendors invite more “guinea pigs” into their testing and optimization betas. But many of the same problems persist – and as such, we're still making a lot of those compromises.

The fact is, if a content authoring experience doesn't appeal to a user, it can impact the quality of the content itself. As CMS community leader Janus Boye channeled from Deane Barker's book on content modeling, happy editors make better content. That should underscore the need to let content – and its authors – help drive the ship when making CMSes.

Thankfully, Greg Dunlap has been thinking a lot about these questions and challenges, and he's written a book about it called Designing Content Authoring Experiences. In it, he pulls back the veil and gives us a refreshing look at what matters in this messy world of content authoring in a CMS. 

As Greg observed, structure is important. But life is messy – and sometimes, authors need that same kind of unstructured, uninhibited freedom to create great experiences that serve their audiences.

The book is a quick read (150 pages) and filled with dynamite reflections and observations. It's designed for a wide range of professionals, from designers to content strategists to developers, but anyone who's using a CMS will find it insightful. In fact, the CMS community at large has been patiently anticipating its arrival; there was even a Kickstarter campaign to help fund its genesis.

As Greg pointed out, he’s not prescribing a solution to all our woes. Instead, he's refocusing the lens on the author’s experience, which often gets lost in translation as businesses make big-ticket decisions about what tools they buy to drive content – tools intended to simplify things at both the user and organizational levels. 

But as Greg noted, making something easier can often come at the cost of good content. That's why this book is so important: It provides a level-headed refresher on what really matters.

“I always start with the needs of the content, and work backwards to the authors,” he said. "Ask most content authors, and they might say ‘I just want WordPress,’ but that doesn’t meet the needs of the organization.”

Exactly. Everyone can benefit from understanding where the opportunities and weaknesses exist.

Greg recently joined me as the first guest on our all-new “The Critic's Corner” podcast (go check it out and follow us for future episodes). We had a fantastic conversation about his journey to CMS – which is seldom a straight line – and what inspired him to write this book.

A long, strange trip to CMS

Is there any other kind of trip to the world of content management? 

I won't go into the hero's exposition. You can hear it straight from Greg in the podcast. Here's a two-minute snapshot of our conversation, just to get your content juices flowing:

Like many of us, Greg came to CMS from somewhere else. I've seen that background and skill set consistently show up in the resumes of many leaders in our space. As someone with an art history degree, I was taught to think like an information architect – leveraging tagging, meta descriptions, and other facets of structured data to help tell stories about paintings. Given that, the leap to CMS isn't so strange.

Greg started in a similar place, earning his academic degree in photojournalism with minors in the art field. But he found himself drawn to computer science, entering the software field in the early ‘90s. During that period, he supported a colleague by building custom solutions to help businesses make changes to websites – things like custom UIs for editing content blocks independently.

Around 2007, he found himself at the Seattle Times, working on their new media team. There, he was caught in a world transforming from print to digital, one where content management was a critical requirement but also a morass. With multiple systems and properties under the roof, Greg and his team were tasked to consolidate everything in Drupal.

From there, he also helped shepherd some groundbreaking projects at Lullabot, a Drupal-focused agency. During his tenure, he worked on a major project for the State of Georgia, an experience that taught him a lot about content management governance, compliance, and the critical importance of authoring. That public sector knowledge has served him well in his latest gig at Bixal, a digital shop that focuses on delivering government services with digital and human-centered solutions.

Through it all, Greg has been making mental notes about what hasn't worked, probing around a number of central questions: Why have content authors been overlooked when building CMSes? Why haven't vendors been more tuned in? 

“The context of your users and the organizations they work for and the content they produce drives the authoring experience,” he said. “But when you’re a vendor, you’re building something that has no knowledge of any of these things.”

During our conversation, he shared a story about missing the mark at the Seattle Times, where users were upset that a critical piece of functionality had been removed from the CMS.

“After we launched, one of the people from the editorial department that actually enters content into the CMS, came to me and said, ‘Hey, in the old CMS, we had a function to do X, and it was really important to our day-to-day work, and now that’s gone. And the thing that I realized in that moment is that we had never built it, because nobody had ever talked to them about what they do. This whole website had been built with the designers and the executives and the IT people, and nobody had actually gone to talk to the people who use it every single day.”  

That was a big lightbulb flash for Greg. “I can draw a straight line from that exact moment to writing this book.”

A new chapter for content authors

In the podcast, we touched on a number of key themes in the book, from specific industry considerations to the very real struggles authors face around governance. The book provides practical examples of how to negotiate with designing forms (the bane of our existence), to the critical roles of support, training, and documentation.

As Greg noted, every organization is different, and every client has its own unique problems to solve. Forcing square pegs into round holes is part of what’s been keeping him up at night in front of his keyboard.

As CMS practitioners, we're fond of using the term “structured content.” And rightly so. But in the book, Greg reinforces the need for flexibility, and why it's so critical to the authoring experience.

“I’ll see a lot of people talking about coming at it from a very Puritanical standpoint, like structure is king and everything is structured, and the content authors have to accept that everything is perfectly structured, and life just doesn’t work that way," he said. "If your authors are miserable using something, they’re not going to give the content the care that it needs.”

As a long-time student of digital experience, Greg knows a lot about the intrinsic value of prototyping, and how failure is a win when it comes to success. The book highlights this, and we spent time exploring it on the podcast. 

We also dug into the topic of accessibility. Given his experience, Greg has amassed real wisdom on the topic, and we discussed our common experience coping with WCAG and the public sector's Section 508 – and how the experience can be improved on all sides of what we build. Greg tapped expert peers to help guide the accessibility chapter, which ended up being revelatory.

“When I started the book, I didn’t know the authoring standard existed for the backend.” 

There's no mention of AI in the book, and as Greg said, that's intentional. For me, it was refreshing to focus on more practical applications in the authoring ecosystem. Nevertheless, he shared his perspective on the topic during our conversation. Hear what he thinks.

The denouement

I absolutely loved this book. It was clear, concise, easy to read, and full of applicable nuggets. It made me wonder if we're asking the right questions, and how we can better embrace the plight of content authors while accepting the challenges vendors face when building great software. There's room for improvement on all sides of the equation, but authors should be part of the conversation at every step.

During our chat, Greg made a sage observation about our industry's tech-imbued echo chamber. We tend to focus on high-brow topics that don't mean a “hill of beans” to a lot of users. Sure, it's important to have categories and use the right lexicon (I'm talking about you, ontology). But are we being inclusive with how we message the value of our tools? Are we listening to the real problems that users and customers are experiencing – and reflecting that in our product development?

“Look at the discourse of the CMS online, and it’s always headless versus not headless, page builders and DXPs, personalization, advertising," Greg said. "That stuff doesn’t resonate with me because it’s not what our customers were struggling with, like getting people to enter alt text and write in plain text and really low-content maturity problems. I thought there was this great opportunity to talk about authoring experience from the perspective not of the AEMs of the world, but just of the simple stuff that anybody in any system could do to improve things for the groups that they’re working for. And that’s where I thought, ‘There could be a book here.’”

Solving the simple stuff. Weep-worthy? Maybe. I'll leave that to you.

For me, this feels like a new “Bible” for content authoring. I highly recommend grabbing your highlighter and keeping a physical copy in arm’s reach – just to remind you of what really matters. 

How can I get my copy of the book?

Designing Content Authoring Experiences is available in paperback or digitally via EPUB format. Check out www.authoringexperience.com to explore the different online retailers or to order a print version directly from the publisher. 

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