Workflow Research and Analysis - 18F/federalist-design GitHub Wiki

Competitive Analysis

Open source CMS' such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla share a common workflow although the interfaces are widely different.

Create a page > User can preview the page, save draft or publish.

Page preview does not build the menu nor does it include any drafts of other pages. If a user navigates to another page, it will the live version that they see.

Enterprise CMS' such as Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager use complex workflows that are highly customized upon individual implementation.

Complex workflows are not relevant to our audience.

Peer Insights

According to content designers who have lived with CMS implementations in the wild, there were a few common findings:

• The ability to create multiple asynchronous drafts per page generates confused users who cannot locate the version they seek and high abandonment of a large number of drafts. The wrong draft gets published and so on.

• It is difficult to create a system that the user can understand and generate a mental model. Simplicity is our best bet.

• Workflows are problematic in practice. People miss the alerts, forget who needs to review, and publishing happens instead of approval. It is recommended to limit the individuals who can publish the site.

• Versions are restricted to published content. Drafts are not considered a version by most users.

• People tend not to publish frequently enough to 'get good at' using a CMS. Design should target the occasional user who may forget how to use the features between sessions.