The forgotten user: Creating a better web authoring experience

Web teams invest significant effort in designing experiences for end users, yet often devote far less attention to the experience of the people who create and maintain content. In environments with many distributed authors, this gap leads to friction-filled workflows, inconsistent content and an overreliance on enforcement to compensate for systems that were never intentionally designed with authors in mind. This session reframes the authoring experience as an intentional, end-to-end system that includes tools, workflows, guidance, training and governance — not just the CMS. Drawing from real-world examples from a from-scratch university website redesign at Sam Houston State University, the presentation shows how applying UX and conversational design principles to authoring interfaces, forms and decision points can improve editor experience while producing more consistent, people-centered content. The session introduces a practical three-pronged approach to designing a better authoring environment: ease and efficiency, guardrails, and training. You will see how thoughtful defaults, clear guidance and structured choices encourage good practices without adding process overhead. Training and documentation are presented as essential extensions of the authoring experience, not reactive support. Finally, the presentation addresses the mindset shift required to move from treating the website as a documentation repository to designing it as an action-based service built for people. You will leave with adaptable, platform-agnostic strategies for improving authoring environments across distributed teams.