Smart Content Management -- Enhancing UX and Killing Manual Navigation

Many content management systems and content management web applications fall short of serving the client well. A central precept behind content management, is that documents, videos and all sorts of content that a corporation has, should be made available to the public when they seek to buy the goods or engage the services of that company. For example, if a company sells widgets, and they issue a service bulletin to their own techs, if they put it up on the web, a customer might find it, fix their own problem and be happy with the company. Letting the public in on content not only educates them, but the additional information may trigger more sales with less costs associated with those sales.

However as a tekky, I find that a lot of content management systems are just awful. What they do, is throw a whole pile of document links in a browser, and let the viewer decide what they want to read. The User Experience is horrible. I have been the victim of this type of system, and there was a lot of frustration where I finally gave up, and went to Google with direct search terms. It always took me to a site that was better marked with the content that I wanted.

So in what ways must content management systems improve? Manual navigation through the document repository must be eliminated. There must be an AJAX widget to select related material and the content offering page must be continuously updated as more information is gleaned from the user.

A methodology for smarter content management and enhancing the User Experience through unnecessary navigation could be implemented in many ways. One of the methods is to collect the breadcrumbs of visitors to the websites, and use the progression of links to scorecard the documents and determine the logical groupings of them.

One could also mine the meta data with the same result, and assign probabilities to related sets of documents, creating less manual navigation.

This has to be an imperative improvement to content management systems, because we are on an exponential curve of generating content, and he who handles it best, wins in the marketplace. Smarter is not only better -- smarter is richer.

Google has the right idea and they have the biggest content management business in the world. Their system has smart suggestions and a relevance rating.

Over-the-counter management systems must collect meta-data on user's searches, and use that data to improve the user experience