The world of web-based user experience design is a fascinating one. And some of the places you can go creatively to ensure that users of your site get the most of it can be amazing. But, what about those situations where you deliver a solution based on one or more products e.g. WCM/ECM, shopping carts, wikis, etc.?
I suppose this post is most inspired by my own experience of the WCM world. Invariably, you will be building your site (intranet, extranet, website, whatever…) on some platform or product which immediately introduces a level of restriction in terms of what you can do with the user experience. CMS applications tend to be filled with tools and components to make it easy to present common types of content e.g. static content, blogs, polls, forums, document libraries, membership management, etc.
By using these in-built components, you’re automatically tying yourself to the user experience as governed by the CMS vendor. And, having seen numerous CMS frameworks – from open-source to enterprise scale £10,000s-per-licence – sometimes that’s not a good thing at all. Some of even the more expensive tools of the market give such a poor, unfriendly user experience.
Yes, you can do a certain amount with styling, and on occasions (depending on a customer’s requirements) bespok-ing a certain piece of functionality may make more sense than using whatever comes out of the box. But what is the best way to handle those situations where the CMS product provides all that is needed but with a user experience that, for want of a better word, sucks?
Very, very few customers would be pleased at having to pay an expensive licence for a set of tools only to be told that you’d recommend re-writing some of them in a better way (at additional cost). There’s always the possibility of feeding back to the product vendor to suggest UX improvements or changes, but that rarely gets you too far as most vendors will have their own roadmaps and priorities.
There are a number of factors that will impact the best course of action here.
- Your relationship with your customer;
- Your relationship with the product vendor;
- Your knowledge of the product;
- Your ability to apply changes/improvements in a cost-effective way.
There will obviously come a time when a compromise of some description has to be made. If you can persuade your customer to trust you in terms of your advice and to pay for the work you suggest needs done (by promising – with confidence – a return on that investment), that would be a good result.
But, I feel it’s more likely you’ll have to accept that the customer will make a decision on behalf of their users and take the user experience/usability limitations as they come.
If you haven’t got the wealth of persuasion skills necessary, what’s the best way to make the most of the UX elements when delivering a product-based solution where the out-of-the-box user experience is not what you’d like it to be?