Window 7 - Making big productivity gains with small means
Welcome to Advent of Strife and Window 7! 🎄 Behind window 7 we talk about how CMS features can improve on seemingly trivial content operations and create big productivity impact. Lets dive in…
Did you know that, according to Professor Kasper Hornbæk at University of Copenhagen, we waste 11%–20% of our time in front of our computers on systems that do not work or that are so difficult to understand that we cannot perform the task we want to. Thats a remarkable amount of time that leads up to nothing else than frustration. Yet we still tend to become more turned on on many features rather than useful features. In this context, let me ask you a question; When was the last time you utilized all the features available in Microsoft Excel? If the answer is “never” it means a certain percentage of the features available in the software does not provide you any value and merely act as noise standing in the way for usability and productivity.
Our philosophy at Strife has always been to pinpoint those content management workflows that are shared over customer segments and repeatedly causes hickups and frustration in the content publishing process. Rather than focusing on introduction of hyped features that happens to trend right now, but only solves problems for a narrow group of customers, we believe that often times, more value can be created by focusing on dissect, analyze and optimize the fundamentals in content management. Simply because everyone is affected by these fundamentals.
A good example of this is how we solve image management in Strife. Today it is close to impossible to create rich user experience on websites without the usage of digital media like images and movies. As this is a fact we early on decided that a modern CMS also should include DAM (Digital Asset Management) capabilities. If you don’t have super complex needs you shouldn’t need to invest in license and implementation costs for an external DAM just to be able to craft rich user experience on your website. From this base line, Strife is made to be equally capable of managing digital media as it is to manage text based and structured content.
There are however one quite specific feature regarding image management in Strife that significantly boost productivity and eliminates user frustration. How many times have you not published an image in your CMS just to find that out that the image motive you want to display has been cropped in different and unsuitable way for different units. In mobile there is too much space from the head and upwards while in desktop the head is cut half way up. Frustrating right? Improductive right? And a good example of a seemingly small thing that impacts many and causes prominent challenges. And also a good example of something that was tempting for us to solve on Strife. The result implemented in Strife CMS is image properties that gives editors full control of image crop/zoom with abilities to make specific adjustments for any unit or resolution. Together with Strife’s live preview of the page beeing edited, this gives editors total confidence in how images are presented on the website. No need to jump back and forth. No need for image editing skills and no need for external image editing programs. Simply a speed booster in an editorial workflow that impacts basically every organization.
To summarize - obviously a modern and competitive CMS must be in the forefront of solving more and more complex challenges, whether it is to utilize the possibilities of AI to automate repetitive tasks, enabling personalized content at scale or, as in this case, to improve on a fundamental editorial aspect. However, in many cases CMS vendors tends to overlook the basics in favour of introducing cutting edge feature that only makes sense for a narrow group of customers.Strife is not such an vendor.