Posted: Wednesday 14th September 2011
I had a brilliant time sitting down with the users at Staffordhire County Council earlier in the week. This year SCC adopted Contensis to run their Intranet and Website and they kindly agreed to let me sit down with their users to get some feedback and insight into how things have gone in the last 6 months. What a brilliant opportunity to truly understand how a CMS matures within an organisation, reflect on the implementation project and to make sure that we're on track with the developments coming out in the near future.
"I wanted to make sure that these goals were being met..."
Staffordshire Council are working very hard to engage the residents of Staffordshire through their website, inform internal staff through their Intranet and ensure that their content is fresh, of high quality and relevant. I wanted to make sure that these goals were being met and to see what barriers we can remove through future product developments.
Out of the three sessions we had during the day I learnt more than I would in weeks of testing scenarios at my own desk, nothing quite emulates sitting down with users performing tasks with Contensis in the wild - not that their offices were wild, well one was!
I was encouraged by the fact that out of the specific requests for improvements made by the users I was able to say that most of them will be coming out in the next release. One particularly interesting thing I noted was that there are features that a couple of users said they'd find useful which already exist! We'll need to go back and see why these are getting missed, although the 'pass to another' button is visible, for some reason the eye can skip past it or it doesn't quite make sense to the user.
"I wouldn't be happy to decide whether 'Lumpenproletariat' was spelt correctly..."
We've been pushing hard with the Quality Assurance side of Contensis in the last year, encouraging individual authors to take ownership of quality while giving greater visibility to Web Officers and Content Owners about the direction of quality within a site. I sat with a user who often inserted content that she hadn't written herself, this made me ask the question as to whether it makes sense to give her responsibility to ensure quality of the content, the short answer would be "yes" however there may be edge cases where "quality" is domain specific - I wouldn't be happy to decide whether 'Lumpenproletariat' was spelt correctly however I may be called to upload it to a page (that is the correct spelling by the way).
Marxist terminology aside, the feedback from the day has been welcomed here and we're looking forward to ensuring that future releases are absolutely inline with our client's plans.