We’re in an unprecedented era of digital marketing innovation from the tools we use to way customers interact with brands online.  Content Management Systems have emerged as one of the core building blocks of this revolution.

But as the features and responsibilities of CMS evolve, it begs the question – Is CMS getting easier or harder as both a discipline and a tool? We know one thing  – It’s changing.

Expectations around a modern-day CMS can now include a wide range of capabilities from personalization to analytics to marketing automation. With these new abilities come sprawling administrative interfaces and a more splintered group of end users responsible for increasingly specialized roles.

Gone are the days of a single webmaster to manage a website. We now have e-mail marketing managers, web analysts, online marketing managers, user experience specialists, and more. Each of these roles needs to interface with a content management system in different ways.

All these changes make the end user experience of a CMS more important than ever.

I recently wrote a post called the Ease of Use Myth which explored the disconnect between what users say is important to them and what a CMS actually delivers.

The point of the post isn’t that CMS systems are unusable (although I think they should invest far more in their user experience efforts).  I’ve just seen over and over that the end users evaluating a potential CMS say they value usability, but have no idea how to define what that means to them.

You can predict the end result – An implementation that often can’t live up to the generic promise of “ease of use” because it was never defined in the first place.

I believe we’re at an inflection point in the evolution of CMS where ease of use matters a lot. Vendors can’t keep bolting on features to the same old bloated administrative interfaces. And users can’t blindly proclaim they need an easy to use CMS without rolling up their sleeves and making sure the platforms can address their specific scenarios.

It’s going to take a focused effort to rethink the CMS experience for the folks who have to use it everyday. There is no longer a one-size-fits all approach. Digital marketing has evolved into very specialized roles and we need our content management experiences to evolve as well.

If you are a CMS vendor, we need a commitment to investing in the user experience and a focus on simplifying the experience based on specific scenarios.

If you are a third-party integrator, we need more focus on helping clients build better CMS experiences for their internal users.

And if you are an end customer or user of a CMS, we need you to be vocal about your needs and develop a much more comprehensive understanding of what your end users need to accomplish with the tool.

The future of web content management depends on it.