From the consumer perspective, there’s never been a better time to build a website. User-friendly website platforms like Squarespace allow amateur developers to bypass complex code and apply well-designed user interfaces to their digital projects. Modern site-building tools aren’t just easy to use—they’re actually fun.

For anyone who has managed a Drupal website, you know the same can’t be said for your platform of choice. While rich with possibilities, the default editorial interface for Drupal feels technical, confusing, and even restrictive to users without a developer background. Consequently, designers and developers too often build a beautiful website while overlooking its backend CMS.

Drupal’s open-ended capabilities constitute a competitive advantage when it comes to developing an elegant, customer-facing website. But a lack of attention to the needs of those who maintain your website content contributes to a perception that Drupal is a developer-focused platform. By building a backend interface just as focused on your site editors as the frontend, you create a more empowering environment for internal teams. In the process, your website performs that much better as a whole.

UX principles matter for backend design as much as the frontend

Given Drupal’s inherent flexibilities, there are as many variations of CMS interfaces as there are websites on the platform. That uniqueness is part of what makes Drupal such a powerful tool, but it also constitutes a weakness.

The editorial workflow for every website is different, which opens an inevitable training gap in translating your site’s capabilities to your editorial team. Plus, despite Drupal’s open-source strengths, you’ll likely need to reinvent the wheel when designing CMS improvements specific to your organization.

For IT managers, this is a daunting situation because the broad possibilities of Drupal are often overwhelming. If you try to make changes to your interface, you can be frustrated when a seemingly easy fix requires 50 hours of development work. Too often, Drupal users will wind up working with an inefficient and confusing CMS because they’re afraid of the complexity that comes with building out a new interface.

Fortunately, redesigning your CMS doesn’t have to be a demanding undertaking. With the right expertise, you can develop custom user interfaces with little to no coding required. Personalized content dashboards and defined roles and permissions for each user go a long way toward creating a more intuitive experience.

Improving your backend design is often seen as an additional effort, but think of it as a baseline requirement. And, by sharing our user stories within the Drupal community, we also build a path toward improving the platform for the future.

Use Drupal’s Views module to customize user dashboards

One of the biggest issues with Drupal’s out-of-the-box editorial tools is that they don’t reflect the way any organization actually uses the CMS. Just as UX designers look to provide a positive experience for first-time visitors to your site, your team should aim for delivering a similarly strong first impression for those managing its content.

By default, Drupal takes users to their profile pages upon login, which is useful to . . . almost no one. Plus, the platform’s existing terminology uses cryptic terms such as “node,” “taxonomy,” and “paragraphs” to describe various content items. From the beginning, you should remove these abstract references from your CMS. Your editorial users shouldn’t have to understand how the site is built to own its content.

In the backend, every Drupal site has a content overview page, which shows the building blocks of your site. Offering a full list that includes cryptic timestamps and author details, this page constitutes a floodgate of information. Designing an effective CMS is as much an exercise in subtraction as addition. Whether your user’s role involves reviewing site metrics or new content, their first interaction with your CMS should display what they use most often.

If one population of users is most interested in the last item they modified, you can transform their login screen to a custom dashboard to display those items. If another group of users works exclusively with SEO, you can create an interface that displays reports and other common tasks. Using Drupal’s Views module, dashboards like these are possible with a few clicks and minimal coding.

By tailoring your CMS to specific user habits, you allow your website teams to find what they need and get to work faster. The most dangerous approach to backend design is to try and build one interface to rule them all.

Listen to your users and ease frustrations with a CMS that works

Through Drupal Views, you can modify lists of content and various actions to control how they display in your CMS. While Views provides many options to create custom interfaces, your users themselves are your organization’s most vital resource. By watching how people work on your site, you can recognize areas where your CMS is falling short.

Even if you’ve developed tools that aimed to satisfy specific use cases, you might be surprised the way your tools are used. Through user experience testing, you’ll often find the workarounds your site editors have developed to manage the site.

In one recent example, site editors needed to link to a site page within the CMS. Without that functionality, they would either find the URL by viewing the source code in another tab and copying its node ID number. Anyone watching these users would find their process cumbersome, time-consuming, and frustrating. Fortunately, there’s a Drupal module called Linkit that was implemented to easily eliminate this needless effort.

There are many useful modules in the Drupal ecosystem that can enhance the out-of-the-box editorial experience. Entity Clone expedites the content creation process. Views Bulk Operations and Bulk Edit simplify routine content update tasks. Computed Field and Automatic Entity Label take the guesswork out of derived or dependent content values. Using custom form modes and Field Groups can help bring order and streamline the content creation forms.

Most of the time, your developers don’t know what solutions teams have developed to overcome an ineffective editorial interface. And, for fear of the complexity required to create a solution, these supposed shortcuts too often go unresolved. Your backend users may not even be aware their efforts could be automated or otherwise streamlined. As a result, even the most beautiful, user-friendly website is bogged down by a poorly designed CMS.

Once these solutions are implemented, however, you and your users enjoy a shared win. And, through sharing your efforts with the Drupal community, you and your team build a more user-friendly future for the platform as well.

The post Don’t Let a Bare-Bones Backend Design Leave Your Site Editors Stranded appeared first on Four Kitchens.