But at the risk of stealing some thunder from that announcement, I’d like to show off something that we’ve been spending a lot of time on:

This is the add-a-news-story page of LiveWhale, the CMS we’ve developed as an answer to problems posed in our infamous (among our clients, anyway) content management manifesto. In later posts I’ll go into some detail about specific interface choices we’ve made (a personal favorite is the flowchart behind attaching images to news stories), but for now I’ll talk about what we didn’t do.

One of the main problems with most enterprise content management solutions is their unapproachability. A simple task like a creation of a news item can be buried by layers of menus, technical jargon, and–let’s be honest–really ugly interfaces. It’s the type of interface that savvy users master through days or weeks of training and non-savvy users end up navigating by way of post-its on the side of their monitors. But you need those weeks to worry about everything else involved in your website launch; you need that space on the side of your monitor for pictures of your kids.

We set out to create an interface that minimizes the distance between what the user wants to accomplish and what she has to do. This gap is huge huge in most enterprise CMSes. Adding or editing a news story is a task that every staff member at your institution understands intuitively; why does it so often feel like piecemeal data entry?

Making the user click “Attach resource” when she wants to add an image creates a cognitive separation where one needn’t exist. So all of our instructions and labels are in plain English. Steps like having to enter the story body on one page and the contact info on another–or burying things in menus, or presenting disparate information as visually equal–create a similarly artificial distance. That’s why our news edit page looks almost like a published news page: we want the headline to jump out at you and the image to appear at reasonable size, and we want everything that appears on the frontend to appear here.

By minimizing this distance between the user’s goals and the user’s processes, we think we’ve made LiveWhale a snap to use regardless of where you fall on the scale of technical knowhow. One of these days we’ll give more of a detailed tour; but, in the meantime, let us know what you think.