I’m going to start this post by apologising in advance to the creators of the two products that I’m using as examples. There is absolutely nothing wrong with them as far as I know and I’m only using them because they displayed screenshots that illustrate my point.
Looking at content management systems, I’ve noticed that so-called “simple and intuitive interfaces” are usually anything but simple and more often than not lacking in the intuitivity department.
I think the problem stems from the fact that content management seems at face value to be a relatively simple concept. A system to store chunks of text or html and files such as images or other downloadables. An interface to allow a user to login and then edit or add to those stored items and a display system to output the content on request – Easy!
…or not so, if you’ve ever tried to build or even configure a CMS, you’ll be aware of how much complexity the freeform nature of content management creates. I think what usually happens is that the developers of the system define all of the information required within the CMS and then try to build the best interface they can to accomodate everything that the system can do. The interface designer is usually tasked with applying tidy HTML and sexy looking styles to the existing forms. The problems arise when the CMS has been installed and configured by somebody with plenty of technical knowledge, often an expert in the system in question, and then hands it over to the person who will be responsible for creating and managing the content.
A person may be the best person to write a page of marketing spiel for a company or product website but, given an overload of content management options, might also be the most likely to horrendously botch the site.
Here are my two examples:
In both cases the designers have done a good job of making the interfaces neat and nice to look at but the problem remains that there is a hell of a lot of options on display for what should be a case of editing a hyperlink or a page of text. Multiple sets of tabs and button sets may provide all of the required functionality but I wouldn’t call it intuitive.
Intuitive should mean that I can use the system wihtout thinking too hard and certainly without resorting to a manual or documentation (at least for the basic tasks).
Complex software is easy, simple software is much harder because you need to find clever ways to hide the complexity.
e.g.
Managing web pages, we could extract meta keywords and description content from the visible page content by default. These page properties could then be more or less hidden unless specifically requested for editing by a sufficiently experienced user.
It’s a simple enough thing to describe but technically quite challenging – we would be adding complexity to the software in a clever way in order to simplify it for the end user.
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