In this week’s newsletter, sign up for our “Elements of User Experience” and “Making Your CMS Work for You” courses, and read Jeff’s essay on improving CMS development. Also, read about Adaptive Path’s part in the extremely successful Creative Commons redesign.
Upcoming Workshops in Chicago and San Francisco
“Elements of User Experience” is coming to Chicago! On December 6, Jesse James Garrett presents a one-day workshop based on his groundbreaking work with the Elements of User Experience and Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams models. The course will give you a framework for user-centered Web design by imposing order on the wide array of terms and concepts surrounding user experience development. He’ll review the big picture of user-centered Web design — from strategy and requirements, to information architecture and visual design — and explain how each element can help you develop a process.
In San Francisco, on January 25, Jeffrey Veen and Peter Merholz present “Making Your CMS Work for You,” a workshop that will answer the question, “Why do so many CMS projects fail?” Whether this is your first time considering a content management system, or you’ve been burned by failed implementations in the past, this workshop will teach you how to do it right.
Seats for both workshops are limited, so sign up today. Newsletter subscribers get a 15% discount off this workshop by using discount code FOAP during registration. You can register for both workshops here.
Making a Better CMS
By Jeffrey Veen
I did some research recently at OpenSourceCMS.com — a fantastic site that lets you play with dozens of CMS installations — and left pretty depressed. What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks.
The experience cemented a theory of mine: Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
This whole category of software desperately needs to be redesigned with writers, editors, designers, and site owners in mind. Here are my recommendations to the folks writing open source content management systems.
Read the rest of Jeff’s essay »
Adaptive Path Helps Move Copyright Permissions Into the 21st Century
With the launch of the new Creative Commons Web site, Adaptive Path is proud to have played a key role in what the San Jose Mercury News calls “the boldest experiment yet in trying to catalyze support for copyrights compatible with the digital reality of the 21st century”.
The re-launch coincides with the release of Creative Commons’s CD in Wired magazine’s November issue, which features music by famous artists who have agreed to more open copyright protections.
The Creative Commons redesign furthered the company’s mission to move copyright permissions for audio, images, video, original writing, and educational materials into the realm of “some rights reserved” versus “total rights reserved.”
Collaborating closely with Creative Commons, Adaptive Path ascertained what site changes were necessary to widen the audience beyond tech-savvy Internet users, extending it to non-technical artists and other creative types.
Use of Creative Commons’s site has grown tremendously over the past few years, and the company needed a new way to organize its resources as well as address the needs of customers around the globe. Adaptive Path sought to make Creative Commons’s site clearer and more consistent by carefully reviewing what visitors hoped to accomplish when they used the site, and then matching the site’s functionality and features to those needs.
The redesign ultimately encompassed revamping the company’s home page, honing their messaging, and helping improve the company’s licensing engine. Adaptive Path helped streamline forms and interfaces, and added a banner across the top of each page that allows users to select licenses valid in their country of interest.
The site’s flow was redesigned to enable visitors to accomplish their goals in as few steps as possible. Before the redesign, users often didn’t understand that Creative Commons was a non-profit organization with free tools. The new site explicitly states Creative Commons’s mission on the front page, and indicates that users aren’t charged to use Creative Commons licenses.
The end result of Adaptive Path’s work is a Web site that helps fulfill Creative Commons’s mission and addresses its growing audience’s needs. We’re pleased with the results.
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