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Dani Nordin: "UX Design for Content Management Systems"

Date: 
Thursday, January 15, 2015 - 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Location: 

Drupal Nights

Davenport Conference Room
25 1st Street
Cambridge, MA 02141

Event Type: 
Category: 

Knowing who you're designing for is a vital part of every UX project. But what happens when you're not just designing for end users, i.e. site visitors, but also:

  • Content creators?
  • Website maintainers?
  • Dozens, or even hundreds of people from multiple departments within an organization—each with different content needs, levels of computer literacy, and each of whom is responsible for a significant portion of your site's content?

This is what UX Designers have to deal with when we work with a content management system. Not only must we design for a specific set of end users, who consume the content we manage, we also have to consider the people who create and maintain that content—and often, those people can have widely divergent needs and skill sets.

In this presentation, veteran Drupal designer and UX Designer Dani Nordin will share some of the tricks she's learned from 8 years of working with teams on the web. You will learn:

  • Techniques to make sense of the often-complex relationships between content, content owners and content delivery
  • How to create effective content models that explain those relationships to others on the team
  • How to work testing and research into quick development cycles
  • How to prototype your concepts and deliver findings in a way that makes CMS developers happy
  • How to take personas beyond profiles and into distinct "roles" in the system.
  • The importance of training and documentation for site maintainers and content editors

Discussion and success/horror stories are welcome in this fun, interactive session.

Attachments: 
Presenter: 
Dani Nordin

Dani Nordin is Senior UX Designer at Harvard Business Publishing, where she works with a cross-functional team to guide the user experience vision of hbr.org. She also teaches regular UX Design workshops at General Assembly in Boston, including the popular UX Bootcamp. Prior to joining HBP, Dani was the founder of the zen kitchen, a boutique UX agency specializing in design for Drupal teams. She is also the author of Drupal for Designers (O’Reilly, 2012) and a contributing author to The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 (Apress, 2011). Dani recently completed a MS Degree in Human Factors and Information Design from Bentley University.