Today I saw this tweet:
“Tridion is boring. I wish we did open source CMS”
And I had to react:
“”Tridion is boring. I wish we did open source CMS” Drupal, now featuring Content Editor excitement pack… :)”
Firstly, I would like to remark that maybe someone was having a bad day when they wrote this, but the tweet really did stand out as being the largest amount of rubbish that someone could stick in 140 characters that I have read for a while. Or was it?
I did stop to ask myself is (SDL) Tridion boring? What do I find interesting? Well, what I find interesting is probably best left off this webpage but all things being equal I think you can all imagine that the leading WCM product is not going to be something that is going to light my fires of my interest on a daily basis. In short, it takes more to get me going.
Wikipedia (don’t shoot me Cheryl) defines three types of boredom, of which one of at least our tweeter must have been suffering and all of which are related to problem of engagement of attention:
- times when we are prevented from engaging in something
- when we are forced to engage in some unwanted activity
- or when we are simply unable, for no apparent reason, to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle
I highlighted the one key word in the above types, engage (or engagement). Now I have read allot about engaging customers on websites managed by WCM solutions but I have not read anything on engaging the users of a WCM solution. But maybe he is right, it should be exciting! But then what sort of things would make it exciting? Facebook integration so you can update your status from the WCM interface? Random page publishing? I used to have a sheep that lived on my desktop, it used to do things like munch the side of the windows and take a bath. Maybe that would be good? Maybe RedDot could have a moving RedDot that you have to catch… or maybe we should just go ahead and integrate FarmVille. I know one website management team that would be very happy with that…
So, is your WCM product engaging to the editors? Does it light the fires of interest every time it pops up? Or does it have the same tedious tasks that other products do? Is yours open source and therefore automatically interesting? I would love to hear it, I am genuinely interested…
And before you respond, take this tweet into acount, clearly this organization has the key to editor engagement already…
“@julesdw @dirkwybe Have a Squiz @ MySource Mini – free to download as VM image here: http://bit.ly/1xCgk2 Revolutionary editing interfaces.”
Hi Julian,
if you speak about CMS user engagement (i.e. the authors) they probably could not care less if it is open source or not.
Speaking of authors: for Day’s CQ5 it was an explicit technical design goal to make it fun to use the product. That’s probably not Facebook-game like engagement, but better than SAP-like user interface pain 🙂
Cheers
Michael