Designing Content Authoring Experiences

Designing Content Authoring Experiences centers on learning who your users are and how they operate, then designing workflows that make it easy for them to create quality, well-structured content (and that make it difficult to create inchoate jumbles of wordmess). Crucially, Dunlap also provides examples aplenty of what this looks like in practice and methods for how designers can work with authors and stakeholders to achieve these ends in the design process.

Key Concepts

• Good author experience design requires a careful balance of structure and flexibility (19).
• “Unless designed very carefully, page builders and block-based editors remove the content’s semantic meaning” (27).
• “Removing flexibility is always harder than adding it. […] Authors will always ask for more” (33).
• Authoring tools should focus on making “doing the right things easy and doing the wrong things hard” (45).
• A CMS is not a writing tool; it’s a publishing tool (128).
• Don’t forget to design training! (131)

Impressions

The book's examples focus on CMS design, but the insights they provide aren’t limited to those contexts. CMS use cases are legion and there is clearly a lot designers can do to make those experiences better. This book isn't about the technical details of any one system, however, and advice for adapting established patterns to user needs focuses on the user needs, not the patterns themselves. It's hard to say how CMS design and functionality will evolve over the next few years, but the need for human-friendly ways to interact with those systems will undoubtedly remain.

Dunlap and his editors have done the hard work of making this book short, engaging, and actionable. In the spirit of the A Book Apart (RIP) publications, this is a brief book for people who make things that can be read over a weekend (or in one sitting if you're a fast reader—I'm not). Having read a few ponderous and wandering tomes in my time, I am grateful for the effort that goes into creating short work that is direct and to the point.