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The Web Project Guide

A phase-by-phase look at the web process from ideation to launch and beyond, providing context to the moving parts of a web project.

Terribly excited to be working with Deane Barker and Corey Vilhauer on this great project, sponsored by Magnolia.

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J. Boye - Marketing wants this. Development wants that. What is a digital leader to do?

When you look at how to speed up a complex digital project and deliver high-quality end-user experiences, the palette of options placed in front of you is daunting. It’s never a binary decision wha…

Wrote a piece about digitial leadership on Jboye.com.  “What I’m seeing experienced digital managers do—when their organizational challenges get too wild—is to put shared tools in front of different teams with different needs. That way, they nudge their divergent teams to work together on advancing projects.”

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Open design, take two

I’d like to share this little story and current favorite topic. It’s been an important one to me for ages. Yet it died, only to be reenergized recently. 

Many years ago, back in 2006, I helped lead the design team of TYPO3 which produced the logo and styleguide that has now been in use for over a decade. 

Back then, I had a very hard time onboarding new designers to the community and its open source project. The coders seemed to just keep coming—whereas one or two new designers were found, in a good year.

I began wondering what it would take to make open source software interesting to designers—and we tried all sorts of things. We released the visual identity of TYPO3 under a Creative Commons license, we reached out to everyone, met with designers to explain how awesome it was to share—and pretty much every attempt failed, miserably.

Open source was nice for developers—but the designers we found, typically wanted to be the sole créateur of what they designed and not part of a collaborative team producing things together—or they couldn’t see why they should do something without getting paid for the deliverables. They simply did not appreciate the concept of open source. And we failed to communicate it.

I reached out to several other open source projects to hear how it was working out for them. They pretty much all said the same thing as I eventually noted: 

“Just give up”. 

—Open source just didn’t translate well to design. Instead, just collect some dough and pay for agencies or freelancers to help.

One thing worked, though: Opening up the design process. 

rasmusskjoldan.com/post/102960730333/gathering-input-ideas-on-dashboard-functionality

We did that many times on the Neos project and it worked well—and brought us valuable feedback.

But in terms of real open design—as in collaborating on the design, it was a long drought. From 2008 to 2015, I occasionally looked into what was going on. But I had given up. Some interesting open source architecture projects emerged here and there—but they all seemed to have similar problems with gaining momentum. The vanity of design culture seemed to play a big part.

Yet, here’s the thing. It is actually growing now:

Take a lot at Abstract for example, version-control of your Sketch files:

goabstract.com:

Or look to Mozilla's open design efforts:

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/about/

http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/designing-in-the-open/

And perhaps most notably, things like this happened last week (October 2017): 

http://opensourcedesign.net/summit/

I met with Open Source Design in Berlin after the summit and I consider myself reborn when it comes to open design. I’ll be a proud member of that community and try to help as much as I can. 

We surely are a crowd in love with technology—turned designers—but I think open source design now honestly has a promising future. One where we can build on top of each other’s design patterns and where we can easily enable our communities to help build our products. 

Look at this recent, stellar example from Netlify CMS:

github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/issues/490

There's also a brand new effort to do an Abstract project for the Netlify CMS:

https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/issues/982

Open design at Magnolia

Today at Magnolia where I lead product management and UX, we’re seeing this related pattern: 

Agencies working with our software are asking for (and getting) the Sketch files of our composable UI—to let them re-assemble author interfaces to match their projects.

A big thanks to the folks from Open Source Design for showing the way, in a place I thought would continue to be dark and impenetrable.

What are other good examples? I know they’re out there.

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Concept software changes the game

https://jboye.com/2017/02/08/introducing-concept-software/

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What Will Break People’s Addictions to Their Phones?

Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, is determined to find the answer.

Important and exceptionally interesting to follow Tristan Harris. If you don’t already, do.

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https://www.instagram.com/p/BMjbyRaDa13/ - from my talk at Web Summit.

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What started as a simple hunt for a new computer ended being a move to a modular computing setup. Long'ish post on what went into that decision and I why I think there are a couple of grander takeaways than simply the move from OS X to iOS.

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Joining Magnolia in Switzerland

I’m joining Magnolia as the lead content strategist of their digital business platform software. I will be applying content strategy methods and thinking to both the company and the product itself—and work in the exciting new intersection of content and the Internet of Things. From now on, my work will take place from both Copenhagen and Basel.

Adapting to form-free content is a learning process

If there’s one thing I obsess over in my work life, it is how content can live freely, unattached to any particular output format. Although that concept has been around since the dawn of digital, we’re still at the very early stages of adapting to it. It is still exceptionally hard for human beings to produce content without a clear end result in mind. 

It’s a long and slow learning process for most—to get used to producing content that will work equally well in multiple publication outputs. Especially journalists have adapted quickly. Yet, the amount of time and dedication they put into content production makes them able to pass the learning curve fast. For the rest of the world of more infrequent publishers, there’s probably another 10 years ahead before everyone becomes accustomed to working with content without constantly visualizing and thinking about “how will this look like?”

Following online pieces from Karen McGrane (WYSIWTF), myself (WYSIFTW) and Mark Boulton (WYSIWTFFTWOMG), the latter wrote a couple of years ago:

“‘How does this look?’

should change to:

‘How does this read?’

Device agnostic. Screen size independent and devoid of design. Let’s help content people focus on what the words and pictures are, rather than what the words and pictures look like.”

Supporting content creators in adapting to this new world of form-free content that flows in and out of many different digital touchpoints with highly varying designs and interaction patterns, that’s what will be a big theme for me at Magnolia.

Lead content strategist at Magnolia

I will be working closely with Boris Kraft on making sure his work as Chief Visionary Officer becomes reality inside the product. Working with pretty exceptional people such as CEO Pascal Mangold, head of product development, Philip Barfüss and UX lead, Andreas Weder will be my new everyday life. –A work life that is suddenly no longer the agency life that I have lived for about 18 years. 

I have known Magnolia for a couple of years by now after I first met Boris Kraft at the Jboye CMS Experts Europe group that we’re both members of. It’s a place packed with cool people—in offices around the world in Switzerland, Vietnam, Miami, Madrid and in the Czech Republic.

If you don’t know Magnolia, it’s the digital business platform and CMS used by large organizations such Al Arabiya, Sony, Virgin America, Airbus, Atlasssian, Deloitte and many more. It comes out of the content management world but has transitioned to become a full digital business platform—connecting a broad range of services, enabling organizations to weave together their digital presence flexibly.

Why Magnolia?

So why was Magnolia so interesting to me? See, I used to work as a graphic designer for years. One of my primary sources of inspiration was the Swiss graphic designer and teacher, Josef Müller-Brockmann. There’s a very direct connection between the history of Swiss graphic design and the present design thinking that takes place at Magnolia.

Look how well organized it is—and how clearly and friendly design helps transport messages and interaction:

The graphic design of Josef Müller-Brockmann:

The Magnolia dashboard UI:

Andreas Weder speaks about the Magnolia design and its Swiss graphic design heritage:

“What I was seeking from graphics design was a strong identity, generosity, clarity and modesty. All very classic attributes of Swiss graphic design. I wanted to work with designers, who would first define a strong, solid concept and then defend its key principles against everything I would come up with.”

Everything I know about content strategy will be put to use—and to the test when we venture into new territory with content-enriched IoT. Exciting times ahead!

The Internet of things

One of the topics I’m most eager to dig into is how content and the Internet of Things intersect. Magnolia has made it a key vision to become an IoT platform—a backend for controlling beacons and for managing the content and data that goes in and out of physical, digitally enabled things—be it wearables, beacons, fridges, in-car systems or any other new internet-connected thing.

Here’s Josh Valman of RPD International at the Magnolia 2015 conference, talking about Building an Internet of things:

What about TYPO3 and Neos?

This change also marks an end to a very long involvement in the open source projects of TYPO3 and Neos CMS. Sincere thanks to all of the many nice brilliant people I have worked with in those cool projects.

I have also had many good years at Copenhagen-based web agency, MOC—the place where I was also given the chance to develop content strategy services and involve myself in the international content strategy community.

Where can you find me?

I’ll still be blogging, tweeting but now also reachable at rasmus.skjoldan [ at ] magnolia-cms [ dot ] com 

Every other week, I will spend days at the Magnolia HQ in Basel. The rest (and most) of the time, I will still be in Copenhagen with my wife and kids. The next two months, I will also still have a table at SOHO in the Copenhagen meatpacking district where MOC recently relocated to.

The obvious question is then where I will pick a desk from January.

I’m unsettled about that but a good friend urges me to go for an office on wheels.

Still considering that.

Maybe a gigantic Magnolia logo on this one and I could be quickly off to work in the beautiful forests of Zealand, north of Copenhagen:

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Digital rock star joins Cope

A couple of months ago, we founded Cope. An agency entirely dedicated to content strategy. The first of its kind in Denmark. Today, I’m extraordinarily pleased to announce that Ask Hybel is joining Cope as Director of Strategy & Communication. I will be working in very close collaboration with Ask to bring content strategy services to our clients. And to make this even nicer, we’re seeing plenty of interest from clients—both in Denmark and beyond.

Content strategy and the COPE-model brings something new to the table. Outdated information is literally killing us on the web—and that’s exactly what the field of content strategy and the methods of COPE can help with. In addition, it’s fair to say that today the limiting factor is no longer the technical solution. What’s hard is achieving coherence across channels. And again, that’s what content strategy helps with. 

This way of looking at the universe of digital communication is something that Ask and I share—and is what made us want to work together.

When I first met Ask, it was dead-easy to see just how much value he is able to give clients. Letting Cope be his new platform for doing so is something that frankly makes me damn proud. A very warm welcome to Ask!

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That would be me. Once again repeating wise words of Bret Victor :-) https://www.flickr.com/photos/comprock/16806119955/

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Fossasia 2015—COPE CMS

Slides from my talk at the FOSSASIA 2015 conference, March 13th 2015. "COPE" means to Create Once, Publish Everywhere. The concept often accredited to the Nati…

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Simplifying TYPO3

Hey TYPO3 community! This has been underway for some time—but today, I had the urge to push a couple of last buttons to make this happen: A small start to simplify the TYPO3 brand.

I've been involved in working with the TYPO3 brand for a really long time. Some years back, we made me the brand manager of TYPO3—as an attempt to streamline the expression of the underlying meaning of the TYPO3 brand. One of the ideas was to establish and maintain some core brand ideas that could then be translated into better briefs for all those of us who communicate about TYPO3. Some of it worked—most notably, the community portraits Søren Schaffstein did on the basis of what was called the yearly TYPO3 Story Book.

All in all, the concepts just need to be simplified now. In addition, the marketing team and it's efforts—led by Alain Veuve—has now been greatly strengthened. That's why I'll quietly step down as brand manager of TYPO3 today. I also need to do that to focus even more on Neos.

The last stuff I've done has been to greatly simplify the content describing our brand on typo3.org.

The way that most of the world continued to talk about our products after we introduced a new naming scheme has been dead-simple. We need to follow what people around us has already adopted. TYPO3 is still TYPO3. Neos is Neos—and Flow is Flow. It's all part of the TYPO3 community—so let's just keep all that simple from now on.

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Cope / C.O.P.E. / Copenhagen — and Content Strategy

Yesterday, we launched at new agency, owned by MOC. I'm heading that new thing and it's called Cope. Is that name a tribute to NPR's COPE approach? You bet. And we're from Copenhagen. And we're all about helping out when it comes to coping with massive content—through all the goodness that the Content Strategy field has to offer.

I've actually been doing Content Strategy for a very very long time. Many years, actually. We've just been calling it all kinds of different things. Discovering the Content Strategy field a few years back, kind of made me think, "Oooooh, so that's what I'm actually doing, already". Through my deep involvement in the TYPO3 Neos project, I've also been moving more and more in that direction throughout the past couple of years. I simply cannot thank Karen McGrane enough for inspiration and guidance.

Last month, I also met with Relly Annett-Baker for a full-day of work, figuring out how we embed Content Strategy thinking even further into TYPO3 Neos. That meeting made me realize it was time to make a more bold move. 

Content Strategy is really not very well-known in Denmark—as a field of expertise covering the planning, development and management of content. All too often, I hear fellow UX'ers complain something like this: "My prototypes were perfect. The templates were perfect. The design was perfect. And then the client messed everything up with content". That whole line of thinking has been more and more disturbing to me during the past years. Which is why I've also focused increasingly on the content production side of many client project. 

I'll keep doing UX for Neos—probably for a long time. But in general, my focus will turn towards Content Strategy. And yeah, I'll probably more or less say goodbye to doing graphic or visual design. I'm thrilled to make this move—and exceptionally happy that it can happen at MOC.  So please welcome Cope & contentstrategy.dk—we think it's time that Denmark, the Nordic region and maybe even beyond is offered what Content Strategy is all about.

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TYPO3 Neos UX workshop with Think! Digital

In the series of research, workshops & interviews that I run under on a TYPO3 Association budget, the most recent activity was meeting with Think! Digital—a Danish strategic digital agency. 

From Think! Digital—Sara Redin, Lea Thomsen and Klaus Silberbauer

Before meeting with Think! Digital, we've consulted with a growing list of external advisors: iA in Zürich, Leisa Reichelt from gov.uk, Tim Walters from Digital Clarity Group, content strategist Relly Annett-Baker and many more.

Creating or curating?

The discussions with Think! centered around how we balance these two directions of the TYPO3 Neos user experience—and the product development in general:

Should we maintain our strong focus on the authoring experience?

Or should we focus more strongly on the curation of content from many sources (acknowledging that although centralized Content First approaches have great advantages, the world will produce content in a broad range of tools that we need to enable the curation of)

These two directions are not mutually exclusive at all. In the best of worlds, we would be strong in both. Yet given our limited resources, one can argue that we should rather be doing a brilliant job at one—than a passable job at both.

At T3CON14, I presented ideas about moving TYPO3 Neos in the direction of curation—to enable better orchestration of content coming from multiple sources. I still think we should keep working on that to create e.g.

better UI's for reuse of content elements throughout an installation (insert records)

means to connect the media library to external services (pretty sure we're quite far there) to make authors able to use images from a Dropbox or any other type of Digital Asset Management hooked into Neos

integration to collect and stage content from Gathercontent, Contentful and other such services

However—the workshop with Think! made me realize (once again) that we still have lots of important work to do on the Author Experience of Neos. Although we've come a long way in reducing the complexity of content management for many types of our editors—more can be done. That includes for example, facilitating better overviews of what's online and not and how content is performing.

This year, we will also be consulting with Karen McGrane about some new ideas that core team member, Christopher Hlubek, has been working on for some time. The project name for it is the "planning mode". It's overall goal is to make it possible to work with larger content collections in a better and more iterative way. These ideas match rather well with what Think! Digital was pointing to: Make it simpler for frequent as well as infrequent authors to get an overview of current live and staged content and it's performance (both in statistical numbers and KPI's).

The Battle for the Birthplace of Content is not Over

The Raw Content editing mode in Neos is, among many other things, aimed to make it possible to have the CMS be the starting point of content—the place where you actually start writing. 

Think! Digital encouraged us to strengthen our work on these parts of the core author experience in Neos—and to keep moving on getting content creation to start and be stored inside the CMS:

The Raw Content editing mode: - Easily import from Google Docs - Keep enabling people to work Content First with centrally stored content - Could we get people to stop opening Word? It might not be as unrealistic as we have sometimes thought

Editing on the fly - Mobile app for small changes - Further improving our tablet user experience

Thanks to Think! Digital for giving us great input. On Facebook they wrote this little followup:

"It's great to see so much attention being paid to the author experience, as we often meet the 'victims' of bad usability and too cluttered editor CMS interfaces. And also very exiting to see what TYPO3 has become. Keep up the great work and thank you for paying us a visit."

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Yesterday, we released Neos 1.2. Pretty damn awesome work by the core team. To make both the launch graphics and the demo site a great introductional experience to Neos 1.2, I had asked photographers to submit photos. I was pretty thrilled to see the cool pictures that came in. A lot of photos had the quality to be packed into the demo site of Neos – but one, worked particularly well. Thanks a lot to Daniel Bischoff from daniel-bischoff.photo for contributing this photo. What an amazing place! I'd love to stand there myself. (Taken in Switzerland at a place called "Seealpsee")

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Open sourcing my brain activity

I'd like to share some of the decision-making power over my brain activity – with the TYPO3 community (or beyond). If you were given the keys to my judgement on activities related to content management and TYPO3, what would you have me do?

I'm not entirely sure what kind of animal this is, really? But I can see that he's looking over the horizon – and probably thinking about it's next steps? I couldn't find a better suiting image for this blog post. Sorry.

A tiny bit of background 

Those who are unfortunate enough to have wasted time reading through some of my lengthy posts about content management and UX know that I take part in an international open source community – and in particular one of it's products called TYPO3 Neos.

A basic idea of open source involvement is to scratch a personal itch. In The Cathedral and the Bazaar it's stated that "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

But... I'm no developer and to me this principle has never really worked.

Scrathing your own itch?

Here's the thing:

The work I do for TYPO3 often has impact beyond what I'm personally motivated by or interested in. It does makes a difference to clients, developers, agencies or freelancers if I push this or that.

Many of the core developers I work with are extraordinarily humble when it comes to deciding on what to focus. In so many ways, they serve the greater good of the community.

I'm frankly quite inspired by all of the TYPO3 core developers (on all 3 major teams) – and I would like to embrace this approach.

Furthermore, one of my friends recently has become very sick. It's made me think a bit about what I prioritize. Yet, finding truth in what I'm personally interested in is also just a bit boring. Why not influence each other on this? I try to give honest feedback to the people around me – and I hope to receive the same.

The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there

Like most people around me, I'm rather obsessively looking for where in the world I can achieve something meaningful. But this whole thing about just looking inwards to find the answers to everything, seems too self-centered. I would much rather connect to the world around me and figure it out together.

Here's a warm welcome to help decide over what I should concentrate on in the next couple of years of TYPO3 work.

If anyone would ever want the same kind of feedback, then I'd love to give that back.

[rasmusskjoldan]

Gathering input & ideas on dashboard functionality for a CMS

On the TYPO3 Neos team, we're in the process of building dashboard functionality into the core.

A dashboard is a well-known, easy-to-copy concept. We all know Google Analytics dashboards and all the other the widget-type dashboards. There's also a broad range of newer software – like Geckoboard, Leftronic, Cyfe or Panic's Statusboard for the iPad.

We've also taken a look at Soasta for inspiration and we've been talking with Resultify from Sweden to get input on their approach to measurable content marketing.

This post is a small presentation of the thoughts we put into structuring dashboard-information into Neos – in both short and long term. It's all very work-in-progress.

We'd like to welcome everyone to give us feedback

How do you use dashboards in a CMS?

What kind of structure could we give a dashboard?

Would it be great – or confusing – to distribute dashboard widgets across different interfaces in the software?

....?

Early sketches

UI sketches from 2013 – dashboard widgets

UI sketch – dashboard widgets reused in the analytics tab of the inspector sidebar

The dream that always dies

When looking at lots of real-life scenarios of dashboard usage – in many different types of organizations – one trend seems to happen across many of them:

People dream, talk and plan to set up "the perfect dashboard". The dashboard that will make a significant business impact – the dashboard that will continuously inform employees and enable better decisions. And though a few organizations really do get it done – all too often, the workload required to figure out what is really relevant on a dashboard is just too great.

Instead, we tend to throw in a bunch of more or less random widgets and hope that it'll give someone something valuable along the way.

Restructuring the dashboard

A simple approach to improve the normal dashboard of various widgets is to come up with a proposed structure for the elements. There are some high-level categories that can help:

Site performance 

Tasks (based on rules, popular on-site search terms or performance changes)

Goals

External services

It could be split up on many different ways – basically just to help users to organize their dashboards.

Where in Neos should we put dashboard functionality?

The most basic interface structure of Neos

In Neos, we have a design principle that asks us to always look for a clear separation of different types of elements. So far, this has been the most overall structure of the Neos UI:

Content area let's you do content editing (surprise)

Navigate let's you structure your content

The inspector area lets you change stuff while editing content

The menu let's you do the major shifts in Neos between different modules

The edit/preview panel lets you edit content in different ways and do simulation runs before publishing

Dashboard widgets could both be placed in the sidebar inspector, the full-screen inspector, a full-screen dashboard, a separate panel from the top, in the menu etc. As always, we need to find a way to embed the functionality into the UI in a framework-like way. Why? Because different agencies or different clients use the software differently. 

A dashboard and widgets could work in different ways:

As a normal, full-screen dashboard – the place in the software that you go to when logging in, starting new tasks, checking jira issues or analyzing current performance of the installation. Here, the proposed categories of widgets can be accessed or changed.

As a "system of intelligence" throughout the CMS - adding performance metrics, tasks or content briefs “whereever and whenever needed”

As a sidebar to the content area – a bit like installing an add-on in Google Docs, giving the user contextually relevant dashboard info right next to the content space

As a top panel - sliding down to quickly go back and forth between a dashboard. This would supports cases like  1) "I just checked the dashboard. Those numbers suck. I should change something." 2) Change the content 3) Re-check the dashboard & iterate

Rethinking the dashboard

Another more radical approach we have discussed on the team is to rethink the typical full-screen dashboard and turn it into a stream of automated, notable information. Too often, we see users struggle to find their way around eg. Google Analytics for something like this: 

"What has changed that is important to me?" 

What if the dashboard parsed external information services (like Google Analytics) to look for significant changes? The UI could then highlight spikes, performance peaks, sudden irregular changes to user behaviour, changes to traffic sources etc.

This would enable us to give the dashboard user a much better guess at "what has changed and is important". Such widgets that show significant changes could bounce to the top of a stream of dashboard widgets for example.

What's next?

Right now – as part of the big Neos November sprint, we're working on both a basic dashboard UI and basic integration of Google Analytics. But in order to make the UI flexible enough to accomodate lots of different external services being pulled into the system, we need to think and plan ahead – and make sure we adapt the UI to many different use cases.

What do you think? Let us know how you see both the current and future state of dashboards in CMSs :-)

Update

Conceptual sketch: A new central UI area – could be labelled "dashboard", "control room" or "cockpit" – slides up and down to give easy, system-wide access to the global dashboard widgets

Conceptual sketch: Expanded "dashboard" / "system dashboard" / "cockpit" / "control room"