Posted by Michael Marth NOV 21, 2009
Posted in ignite Add comment
RT @joannekh:
Day Ignite presentations now available at www.day.com/ignite
Entries filed under 'ignite'
- ease of use rather than feature richness and
- seamless integration into the UI
Posted by Greg Klebus NOV 11, 2009
Posted in cms, cq and ignite Add comment
After the Ignite in Zurich, there came Ignite in Chicago, where our American customers, prospects, partners, and Day staff met to share information, experiences, to network, and simply have a very good time. The event itself was slightly bigger than the event in Zurich, both in terms of number of participants and available room.
Ignite was hosted by Day customers, in more than one way: by the City of Chicago itself, and by the grand Intercontinental Hotel, of the IHG Group, on Chicago's famous shopping avenue, the Magnificent Mile.
Again, we had a lot of great presentations, panels, Q&A sessions, as well as informal chats. And the Foreigner concert at the end was the icing on the cake.
Be sure to check out the conference hashtag was #dayignite and here are some Ignite pictures on Flickr, with lots of new coverage from Chicago:
Looking forward to next year's Day Customer Summit!
Posted by Michael Marth OCT 28, 2009
Posted in ab testing, cms, cq5 and ignite Comments 3
Won't somebody please think of the
childrenauthors?
(almost Helen Lovejoy)
Have you seen the component for multi-variate testing (MVT, aka A/B testing) in the upcoming CQ5.3 release? I saw it demoed by David at Ignite and was completely blown away: CMS users (authors) can simply drag a couple of alternative banners onto the component right from within their regular editing interface (the CMS will then show the different versions to different users and count the click-through rates so that eventually the best performing banner is determined).
The MVT feature reminded me of two other CQ5 features: personalisation and analytics. All three are truly and seamlessly integrated into the user interface of the authors and they all provide less functionality than full-blown standalone solutions. To give you a concrete example: for each page the editors see right in the site admin (i.e. in their daily user interface) how many views each page got in the last 30 days. Clearly, this is no match for the kinds of reports you get on, say, Google Analytics, not even the same ballpark. Yet, I still think the authors get something that is valuable for them: they see it right away what is of interest to their audience.
(there is screencast available that demonstrates personalisation features from an author's perspective, registration needed)
When I compare this author-centric evaluation of functionality with my usual point of view as a system architect the business value of a feature for an author might be determined by:
This is probably true for most systems that have non-technical users, but I believe the effect is amplified in CMSs because many CMS users use the system only once in a while rather than regularly.
Of course, this author-centric view on features should not necessarily dictate the underlaying systems architecture especially when you look at a complete content management solution encompassing analytics, personalization etc. The architecture might still be full-stack or best-of-breed and I do not want to postulate one being better than the other. However, I believe that one way of knowing that you got the author's user experience right is when you cannot see the system architecture reflected in the UI anymore. Or to put it the other way round: the UI should not enable you to guess which box which feature is running on.(*)
Thanks to Lars for providing discussions and ideas on this post.
(*) This idea is adjacent to a pet subject of mine: the user interface for basic content management (CRUD stuff) should not enable you to guess the underlying content/data schema. Sadly, up to today not few CMSs UIs resemble ERP-style data entry masks.
Posted by Michael Marth OCT 19, 2009
Posted in cms, cq and ignite Add comment
Ignite in Zurich was a blast. Lots of good presentations (which I will hopefully be able to share later) and excellent discussions on content management. My favourite quote was from Newsweek's Meshach Jackson. Their editors on the CMS selection process:
If you don't select CQ we're all quitting.
I also enjoyed what David Nuescheler had to say about separation of content and layout. The standard CMS architecture thinking goes like this
a) we need to separate content and layout
b) therefore, the user interface for the authors cannot look anything like the rendered pages and we will make it look like a database entry mask
David demonstrated that a) simply does not lead to b). Or in his own words:
Separating content and layout does not mean you have to confuse the authors
To get a taste of the event: The conference hashtag was #dayignite and here are some Ignite pictures on Flickr:
So, in case you missed Ignite Zurich there is still Ignite Chicago coming up...