Digital Landfill

If I were running a content management company -- I know, a frightening proposition -- I would spend every R&D dollar I could find on 1) user experience; 2) ease of implementation; and 3) mobile accessibility on any device.  And forget adding more cool features and functions until I solved those basic needs.

I was reminded how important this is -- especially in selling solutions to executives like me who are aggressive users of technology, but not necessarily deeply competent technically -- by an experience last night.

I use a simple Google Form to handle one of the most pain-in-the-neck processes that I manage -- scheduling a conference call for executives on my Board who are on calendaring systems that are not accessible to the "scheduling" function within mine.  I used to send around many, many recursive emails asking, "How about this time?" "How about that time?" "OK, that doesn't work for Bill, let's try 10 am." "Oh, now that doesn't work for Jim."

So I just use a simple form for that.  It takes 3 minutes to set up.  Last night, I set it up when I was tired, and set it up with radio buttons (you need to make a single choice) rather check boxes (you can check off mutliple options) -- oops.  This morning, I corrected the form -- on my phone, and in 30 seconds -- and all was right with the world.

So what is so noteworthy about this simple process that I thought it worthy of a blog post:

1. Even a CEO can do it.
2. I don't have to talk to IT.
3. I can do it on any platform I own (and being a gadget guy, I own a lot).

Now I KNOW transactional content management at scale is WAY WAY more complex than my little Board scheduling problem. 

But my point is that the expectations from the consumer world carry over into enterprise world.  From a usability perspective, I expect my enterprise systems to meet the three tests above:  1) the CEO can do it; 2) He/she can do it without IT; and 3) He/she can do it on any platform.  

When I use our association management systems, it drives me nuts beause the UI looks like it is a relic from the era of DOS programming. Even though it has great functionality, I want sometimes to throw it out the window because, frankly, it is ugly. And I can't access it on my phone. And it seems to generate more conversations than I would like with IT (not that they aren't wonderful people...)

So, content management companies, my advice is to be ruthless in simplifying the user experience.   Make your solutions easy to implement. Make them work on anything I use.  Focus on solutions even a CEO could love.  Think about Mikey in the Life cereal commercials ("He likes it! He likes it!").  And forget about everything else for now. 

We're going to be talking about some of these issues at our upcoming AIIM Seminar series -- in this series, looking at mobile and social from a governance perspective.  Check them out -- they're free!