Two types of CMS users
Categorised under: Content management, James' articles
Content management systems are frequently rolled out widely across whole organisations, following a ‘decentralised authoring’ model.
As discussed in the earlier article The importance of CMS usability, a new CMS product will only be a success if staff make use of it. For this to happen, authors must be able to easily use the solution, and be effective when completing common tasks.
As touched upon in 11 usability principles for CMS products, the needs of two different types of users must be met:
- frequent CMS users or ‘power authors’
- infrequent CMS users or ‘business authors’
This briefing will explore the differences between these users in greater detail.
Frequent CMS users
There is typically a core group of CMS authors publishing content to the intranet or website. This includes the central team, who have overall responsibility for the site (or sites).
Beyond the central team, there may be a number of full-time authors, or staff in major business units, who have specific publishing responsibilities.
For these authors, usability of the content management system means efficiency. They need to be able to quickly complete common tasks, allowing many changes or updates to be made within available time.
[CM Briefing 2008-20, read the full article]
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 