Forming Forms: Designing Content Authoring Experiences

Matt Kleve: Leap year. February 29th, 2024. It's the Lullabot podcast.

Matt Kleve: Hey everybody, it's Lullabot podcast episode 269 I'm Matt Kleve, a senior developer at Lullabot. We are a strategy design Drupal development company, building sites that are big. I don't know how do we describe Lullabot Morgan.

Morgan Eck: Big government higher education sites? Yeah.

Matt Kleve: With me, co-host of the show Front end developer Morgan Eck. Hi, Morgan. Glad you're here.

Morgan Eck: Hey, Matt. How's it going?

Matt Kleve: I'm good. We're leaning into the strategy side today, though, right?

Morgan Eck: Right.

Matt Kleve: We've we often do lots of development stuff. We've done some design stuff, but we're going to get in and talk a little bit about strategy.

Morgan Eck: Today with us. We have got Greg Dunlap. Greg is the director of strategy here at Lullabot, and he's coming in from Monterey, California. Greg has been here for 11 years. On March 18th. So it'll be 11 years on March 18th. And he's been involved in Drupal since 2006. His bodies of work include the State of Georgia, Evergreen University, and the American Booksellers Associations. And he also led the CMI initiative, one of the eight core initiatives for Drupal eight, which aim to consolidate Drupal's scattered site data, views, content types, and module settings to a unified secure API. Greg, how's it going?

Greg Dunlap: It was going a lot better until somebody said, I've been in Drupal since 2006. Man.

Morgan Eck: Correct me if I'm wrong here.

Greg Dunlap: No, no, there's, there's there's no lies detected.

Matt Kleve: That's a good thing though, right?

Greg Dunlap: It's just been a long, long time. That was Drupal five when I first got in. And then even the even the Drupal eight stuff seems like ancient history now at this point.

Matt Kleve: So if we're talking strategy inside of Lullabot, if somebody wasn't familiar with the kinds of things we do, they might be thinking that strategy is like a business side, like we're considering who we might want to work with or or what types of things, or maybe like how we're going to market ourselves and, and put ourselves out there to, to find work. Tell me about strategy at Lullabot. Greg, you're doing all of that, right?

Greg Dunlap: No. So we're doing more the content strategy side and content architecture side. So you know, at Lullabot our bread and butter is building websites for people. And so I'd say we have two main functions in the strategy department. One is that we work with customers to develop the architecture of their site, the content types, the fields how we need to structure their content in order to meet the goals of their organization and the designs that are being created, usually by our own design team. We work extremely closely with the design team during the initial stages of a project, and then we also work with the clients on their actual content, auditing their content, finding out what they've got, helping them be more strategic in how they approach it. Helping them develop things like style guides work with them on migrating content, etc. and setting them up with a plan so that they can be successful in the future with the site that we leave them with.

Matt Kleve: Very good kind of that basic groundwork of, yeah, we need a website and we want it to be pretty and we want it to function this way. But websites have content, and how that content lives in your site is important and things you should be thinking about, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. I mean, one would one could argue that that's the entire reason that your site exists. Really, at the end of the day. You know, I wish the clients always agreed, but I think I think that it's definitely something that's becoming much more, I think, prominent in the, in, in the tech sphere, and especially when you look at organizations like the SLED organizations, the, the government education organizations that we often work with.

Matt Kleve: SLED: state, local education.

Greg Dunlap: State local education. Yes.

Matt Kleve: These are acronyms that that get invented and I can almost follow them all. But yeah.

Greg Dunlap: That was why I clarified right after I said it, because I realized it was a mistake.

Matt Kleve: How long have you been professionally been doing content strategy type work? When did you hang up your IDE?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. So I was doing I was my background is as a software engineer, as you say. And about the time that I got to Lullabot, I was hired as a technical architect, and I was thinking that I was like, getting less and less interested into the day to day problems of coding and more and more interested in the big problems that I saw our clients not addressing before project started. Because I was finding myself fixing the same kinds of things all the time, I was finding myself answering questions that should have been asked a year ago. You know, when we were far too deep into a project to really do anything about them. And so what I wanted to do was to find my way up earlier into the project, and content strategy was sort of the path to that. I, I tended towards the nerdier content architecture side of the equation which shares a lot of similarities to database modeling in a lot of ways. And our former colleague Jeff Eaton, you know, helped kind of bring me into that world. And and so that's where I ended up here today.

Matt Kleve: And I, I hear you are trying to share some of the knowledge you've gained over these years. And you wrote a book, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. How about that?

Morgan Eck: Tell us more about Designing Content Authoring Experiences, your book coming out.

Greg Dunlap: So I've had a really I've had a real interest in content authoring for a long time. The first Drupal gig I ever did was at the Seattle Times. And we did a big thing where, you know, back then, a lot of people were hand rolling their CMSs from scratch. And so we had like 5 or 6 of those running a site, and we wanted to consolidate them into one Drupal site. And so we did all that and we launched it. And after we launched, I started getting all of these questions from the editorial teams, like, where's this functionality that we used to have? And how come I can't do x, y, z. And why does it take me 15 clicks to upload a photo and things like that? And it was really surprising to me because of course they had these questions. We had never talked to them like we had never actually asked them what they needed out of the system. And it was really eye opening to me about how this like segment of the population that uses a CMS day in and day out are just like left completely disenfranchised from the process very often when we do these gigs. And so that really got me thinking a lot more about authoring experience. As I worked at different agencies over the years, I tried to make sure early on in projects when I had the opportunity, that when we were bringing different stakeholders to the table, we also talked to editorial teams and make sure that they had, you know, a say in the process.

Greg Dunlap: And I'd say a lot of this really started to come to fruition when we did our project for the state of Georgia. We did a lot with content authors on that project. We did a lot of interviews. We did a lot of paper prototyping with them about page building tools. It was the first project we did that used Drupal's Layout Builder functionality. We did a lot of designing, you know, components that went into that project. And a lot of it was really successful, I think. And it started it started me thinking about how this was just sort of a, you know, a little bit of a segment of our world that isn't really talked about or written about or anything like that. And so I started talking and writing about it more, and the more that it came out, the more that I realized that there was a book there. So about two years ago, I pitched a publisher on this book kind of my dream publisher. And to my great shock and surprise, they said they would love to do it. And so I wrote a first draft, 35,000 word first draft and sent it in to them. And we were just beginning the editing phase when they hit a financial crunch, and they paused production on all of their books in progress, and they said that that would happen till the end of the year at least, and could be longer.

Greg Dunlap: They weren't making any promises, and they were saying to all of their authors in progress that if they wanted to be left out of let out of their contracts, they could be. And so I was kind of thinking, you know, they're saying they don't know what's going to happen in the future. But on the other hand, if you are bullish about your future, you're not letting your authors out of your contract. So I was kind of reading between the lines there that that was kind of a done deal. And so I spent some time looking for another publisher and other sources of funding, because what I knew was that I needed this book to be edited and designed and laid out and published. And I knew that those are professional services that, you know, I wanted to hire somebody to do for me because they aren't professional services that I could provide myself. And I needed money to do that. And so every, every sort of avenue that I pursued kind of fizzled out. And so finally I decided to put together a crowdfunding campaign. And about a couple of weeks ago, I launched a Kickstarter to fund the completion of this book that I've had. And as it stands right now, we just crossed the 50% mark today. So we're halfway there and we've got two weeks to go. So, you know, I'm hopeful that it will happen and this work can finally get out into the world.

Matt Kleve: Since this is all like happening right now, it's important to have context here. We're recording this on Monday the 26th. This episode is is set to release on the 29th Thursday morning. So you still have time left to if you if you're interested in this Kickstarter, right?

Morgan Eck: There will be a link to it.

Matt Kleve: There's a couple of weeks left.

Greg Dunlap: Plenty of time. Yep. March 14th is my is my March 14th at noon is my cutoff date. So plenty of time still left to get things going.

Matt Kleve: Were there other publishers? Did you ever consider going somewhere else? I mean, there's there's more than one company that produces books, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. I reached out to the usual suspects in our field, and got nos or ghosted by all of them.

Matt Kleve: Yeah. Okay.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, I would say that I think this is a very challenging time for any business that is largely funded by professional development budgets. And so when you look at things like conferences, when you look at books and, you know, continuing education and stuff like that, in a time when we are seeing such massive numbers of layoffs in the tech industry. And and that's especially true in the content and design fields. It's been it's been a real blow, I think, to all of those places that are mostly funded by people who work at those companies and are they're spending those companies money. And I've heard that in a lot of different places. Certainly at Drupalcon, if you scan the sponsors list, you'll notice that it's lighter than it's been in the past. And I think that is, you know, just bad timing on my part. Just unlucky really is what it comes down to it. And so this is the this is where the path has taken me.

Morgan Eck: Now, you mentioned editing and designing. Will you also have printing and, you know, marketing. Is that also going to fall into your lap?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, running a Kickstarter is kind of interesting because your marketing begins before your thing is even finished. And so like, I'm marketing my book right now and I'm literally right now I'm.

Matt Kleve: [Laughter] Yep.

Greg Dunlap: And so yeah, that's definitely part of it. But yeah, I mean, you know, I will be making printed copies one way or the other. There are lots of different ways to approach that, and they're all very overwhelming. And I've started to research that. And my my thing right now is that's a lot. And I don't want to think about it yet because we're not there. And you know, part of the Kickstarter is, you know, allowing for a portion of that money to go to make the printed copies that I need to to, at the very least, fulfill what the backers have asked for in terms of printed copies you know, and then see where we go from there.

Matt Kleve: Is there a place in the world for dead trees still?

Greg Dunlap: I think so. I mean, my I think my and yours backgrounds would indicate that, yes, there is.

Matt Kleve: Yeah, I do have

Greg Dunlap: .. a video podcast. Both of us have our bookshelves in our backgrounds. That's right.

Morgan Eck: That's the only kind I read. Now, you mentioned content authors kind of being your inspiration for this, but is that your main target for this book or I guess, who who would you say this book is for?

Greg Dunlap: I think the book is for the people who are building the systems that the content authors use. Because, you know, most of the times the content authors are not technical professionals in any meaningful way. Or if they are, they're really focused on the marketing side. Typically, what they are is more writers, editors subject matter experts, you know, as we see a lot with our clients. And but the people who can really affect change in this world are the people who build the systems to begin with. And I think that one of the things that we see a lot is that, you know, a lot of these systems tend to be built and developed through the technology arm of an organization. And so the technology arm of an organization tends to drive it. But I think that we all know from experience that the technology arm of an organization isn't necessarily the best at writing or playing descriptions of things or laying out screens in ways that reduce cognitive load to the user or, you know, making sure that, you know, repetitive tasks aren't, aren't are are as easy as humanly possible. You know, one of the things that I've encountered is that there's a lot of stuff written about form design and form interactions and stuff like that.

Greg Dunlap: But when you're working with a CMS, a lot of those form interactions instead of just happening once, like when you submit a content form, contact form, or when you order something online or whatever, like, like people are having to interact with these things a hundred times a day, you know? And so any of those interactions get really multiplied by a lot. And there's a couple of angles on that. One is that obviously if something takes five clicks instead of two and you multiply that over, you know, the lifetime of the CMS, that's a lot of extra clicks. But the other is that, you know, people become experts at working in these things and people who come into them new take a different stance or angle towards them as the people who are experts. And sometimes that's something you need to allow for or under or doing user research to understand the use cases that your users have and the different roles and stuff like that. A lot of this is stuff that content strategists and content designers and UX designers do all the time, but they're just never brought into these projects. And I think that there's a real, you know, need for those people to bring their skills into these.

Matt Kleve: So a lot of your professional history, at least recently, has been in Drupal. So I'm sure that's kind of shaped your feelings and opinions and things that you may have shared in your book, but I'm guessing that it's not something that's limited to Drupal, right? Content authoring experiences are all over different types of CMSs. General rules might apply to to lots of different situations.

Greg Dunlap: That's absolutely correct. The book is completely technologically agnostic. I don't actually mention any CMS by name in the entire book at all. I don't make distinctions about headless versus traditional CMSs or anything like that. I do think I'm going to be because some stuff has changed in the last year and a half since I wrote my first draft, and I, so I do think I'll have to add some stuff around the kind of, you know, page building tools that are becoming very popular in the industry these days. Probably some words about AI and its use cases. But those are not going to be the focus of the book. The real focus of the book is going to be your traditional field based editorial tools and the things that support them. And so, yes, that's very much informed by Drupal. But I've written the book very much to be technology agnostic as much as possible.

Morgan Eck: I gotta say, having worked on projects that have not had strategy and not had any of this forethought, you know, kind of ahead of just developing things. It makes a massive difference. I that was probably my most painful project I've ever worked on, and I would not wish that on my worst enemy. So.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, I think that you know, one of the things that that the people on my team and content strategy people in general bring to the table a lot is that we're always asking why, like, why are you doing this? Why is this important to you? What are you trying to what are you really trying to achieve when you come to us with a request? And I find that that can really break a lot of logjams, because a lot of times a client will come to you with a question or a request about something and say, you know, oh, I need you to do this. And then when you start asking them why, like, what are they really trying to achieve? It can turn out that the answer is something that's much different than what they asked you to. They just don't know enough to like, think about it in a systemic way or or what, know what the other solutions are and stuff like that. And and we spent a lot of time asking why. I think, I think probably more than most clients would appreciate, but I hope it pays off all in the end.

Morgan Eck: The why before the how? I like that.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah.

Matt Kleve: Do you have a challenge selling your type of work because it's not seen. So if you're designing this awesome content authoring experience for an organization and it does everything they needed to do, and it makes their editors lives way simpler, and they can do a great job of fire hosing content into their website or editing content or whatever their needs are. But that isn't actually how the website looks on the outside, and everybody uses the website. Doesn't care. Like, is it a challenge because what you're doing isn't necessarily seen by the greater audience?

Greg Dunlap: I think it's a I mean, that's definitely a challenge for sure. It's not like improving your authoring experience drives, conversions. You know I think that the thing that is also a challenge is the fact that, you know, the people who are using these systems are kind of often at the bottom of the totem pole of an organization, you know? It's not like the people who are entering press releases into your content management system are driving, you know, technical or marketing decision making day to day. And so their voice is not heard. I think that's a challenge. I think that and for, you know, especially for us in an agency setting where clients are coming to us and we're often responding to RFPs, it's a challenge because this work is often not scoped in those RFPs, and we don't have the opportunity to add it because the RFPs are very specifically scoped to a specific project. That's usually, again, being driven by the technical side of the organization. But it's really a shame, because the problem with that kind of limited thinking is that if you're authoring experience is terrible, your your authors won't use it, you know, and and then you end up with a system that's either completely stale or stuff is shoved in and walked away from because nobody wants to deal with it.

Greg Dunlap: It's not it's not given the care that it needs. And when your content is garbage, that definitely drives conversion. That definitely drives, you know, the success of your organization. It's just harder to measure. And the people doing it don't have a voice. And so I think that's the real challenge in getting this work done. And, you know, one of the things that we've done at Lullabot a lot is we've used a lot of standardization and approaches to that. We that we just build into every project to make them better in a lot of ways. And we've done a lot of work on things like, you know, the Type Tray module that we built for the state of Georgia, where, you know, this is something that that we probably use on every project now. And that investment has paid off a lot. But but it's not like we have a line item for those things. It's things that we, you know, kind of, you know, we we tweak and grow from every project and then carry forward.

Matt Kleve: I'm going to make sure that Type Tray gets added to the show notes. You can check it out on our website. I don't know that a lot of people know it exists and it is super handy. As far as kind of organizing your content types and, you know, making it clear exactly what things do yeah.

Morgan Eck: Now is Designing Content Authoring Experiences, your first book? And do you think you'll be writing any books after this?

Greg Dunlap: It's the first book that I have written alone. In a god in a, I hate to say, a past life because it was just Drupal seven, but, I mean, we're talking about 15 years ago at this point.

Matt Kleve: That counts. Yeah, [laughter]

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. I was working at another agency, and several of us came together to write a book about building modules for Drupal seven, which was brand new at the time, and I wrote two chapters for that book. And, you know, but beyond that, this is definitely my first, like, manuscript writing experience on my own. It was quite a challenge. I probably got a lot to say about it when I'm done. But, I mean, it's hard to. It's hard. It's hard. It's one of those things that it's hard to grasp when you're in the midst of it. And I've been in the midst of it for quite a while right now. So but yes, this is the first book that I have written. And as far as are there any more? I mean, I don't know, it's hard because there's a lot of things that I feel like I could write about, but the process of like, self-publishing is, is a lot of work. It's a lot more work than, you know. It's a lot more work to sell. It's a lot more work to produce. You're not going to sell as much. You know, the, the publisher that I was with had a very good footprint and visibility in, in the world that I live in. And, you know, there, there comes along with that. A lot of, you know, sales and opportunity that I'm going to have much more difficulty to do on my own. And so, you know I think I will try and get through this before I think about another one.

Matt Kleve: You said 35,000 words. Yeah. If that were like a college paper, you know, double spaced 12 point font. How long is that?

Greg Dunlap: Probably 120 pages.

Matt Kleve: I don't have a grasp of what it what it takes to write something of that length.

Greg Dunlap: I don't either. And yet somehow it happened. You know, I I had an outline, and I just started going one one piece at a time. You know, I tried very. I did do a little, you know, jumping around like there are parts that I knew very clearly what I wanted to say and what pieces were available. And there are parts where I didn't, and I did a lot. I was doing a lot of like reading and research leading up to it, and I had a whole like folder full of like, screenshots and quotes and links and all of those sorts of things. And and I started working those in and, you know, anytime I thought about something, I was on a project and I'm like, oh, I should write about this. I would drop a note somewhere and then flesh it out. But mostly I tried very hard to go from the beginning to the end. Mostly because I didn't want to get into a situation where I was writing the easy stuff, and then I was left with all the hard stuff at the end.

Greg Dunlap: The stuff I didn't know what I was going to do with. And so I tried to go straight through, and sometimes I would go into little detours like I was writing about, like, what? There's a, there's a part early in the book where I sort of have a history of content management, and I was talking about how in the early days of content management you know, people were hand cobbling together systems that were barely more than like, you know, a text area and a button, you know, and, and my editor had mentioned, oh, I would love to see one of these. And so I actually revived my first ever content management system that I wrote from scratch, like a guy I used to work for ended up having a zip file of the code sitting on his hard drive, and he sent it to me, and it was in PHP, like, you know, two or something. And I got actually got it up and running and got screenshots in it for the book. So stuff like that was kind of fun. Wow.

Matt Kleve: That's really cool.

Greg Dunlap: And it was, it was literally just a you you could write blocks. It was basically you could type information into a text area and save it. And then a programmer could place these blocks. You couldn't even place them as an editor. All you could do is edit the text in them, and then the programmer would have to place the blocks wherever they went on the site. So literally all you could do was choose a block and edit the text in it. It didn't even have an HTML editor or anything like that. Like that stuff was all very new. And so it was, you know, it was it was so basic in terms of, in terms of its functionality compared to what we have now. But it was such a step forward because like the people who worked, it was for a church in Tennessee, and the people who worked at this church didn't have to contact their developers anymore to make changes to the website. It was it was world changing for them.

Matt Kleve: How far we've come, right?

Morgan Eck: Yeah. What more do you need?

Matt Kleve: We're talking with Greg Dunlap. Greg is the director of strategy at Lullabot. He's also written this book, Designing Content Authoring Experiences that he has got on Kickstarter. Right. Kickstarter is where it is.

Greg Dunlap: Yep.

Matt Kleve: And we'll make sure we have that link in our show notes as well. And you can help fund the production of Designing Content Authoring Experiences. We're not just going to let Greg plug his book. We do want to pick his brain a little bit about how we can actually design our content authoring experiences and maybe learn a little bit about things that he thinks Drupal is doing right, and maybe even what they're not doing right, and how you can improve your Drupal site. Because guess what? A lot of people forget those forms. You can like, change and edit and alter and make things work better. Like you're you're responsible for your Drupal site. Still, it's not just that's the way it is. Anyway, that's my rant coming up right after this. [Intro music]

Morgan Eck: Welcome back to the Lullabot podcast. We are on with Greg Dunlap, the Director of Strategy here at Lullabot, and we are talking about his book Designing Content Authoring Experiences and his upcoming Kickstarter, which ends on March 14th. Get out there.

Matt Kleve: Now is the time.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, that's now is literally the time. Like right now or right now in two days when you hear this.

Matt Kleve: Greg, the last time I heard you on a podcast, you weren't talking about strategy or content strategy or or Drupal or anything. You were talking about pinball.

Greg Dunlap: [Laughter]

Matt Kleve: Are you that pinball guy?

Greg Dunlap: I guess I'm that pinball guy. Yeah. I've been playing pinball competitively for 30 years, and I've also worked for pinball companies, writing software for pinball machines, and I've also worked operating pinball machines for the public. And I have fixed and restored pinball machines in my life. I have, and I've been involved in the competitive pinball community running tournaments. And I was the state representative for the Pinball Ranking Association for the state of Oregon for six years. And I've been very active in the pinball community. And actually, if you Google my name, you find many, many more pinball things than Drupal things.

Matt Kleve: That's good. And we hope to find your name next to a book, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yes, yes. Soon enough.

Matt Kleve: Greg, tell me a little bit about Designing Content Authoring Experiences. If I were to crack it and read it, what's what's one big takeaway you think that that people won't realize until they they dig in?

Greg Dunlap: I mean, one of the, one of the biggest ones is something that seems like it should be very obvious, but I don't think for many people is, which is that, you know, the authors of a website are just another user, right? They're no different than the users of the front end of your website. They bring but they bring a different perspective and use case. And as users of your web property, you can bring the same skills that you bring to bear for creating the website's front end as you do in the back end. And you know the process can be very similar to you do research, you do prototyping, you do designs and you test them. You build the thing. And when you build it, you also test it with the real users who are expected to use it in real use cases. And then you make a plan to maintain it and continue testing as it grows over time. And the use cases change. And you know, that's not rocket science, right? And I mean, there's there's a lot of different angles that you bring to it. And while the skills that you may bring to, for instance something like how you research with the users is a little different than the ones that for your end users. But but at the end of the day, you know, you're really trying to figure out what people want out of the website, what they're trying to do and what their goals are and the goals of the organization and how to make the two come together and fit together. And, you know, I just don't think, you know, I think a lot of people think of the CMS as this, like, sort of monolithic thing that they drop down, that they don't have a lot of influence over.

Greg Dunlap: And, you know, I think in I think depending on your product, that's to greater or lesser extent, it's true. But there's no I can't, I can't think of any CMS that you can just drop in and you don't have any like, you know, ability to adjust or change the authoring experience in one way or another. Even something as simple as, like the order in which the authors enter the fields, right? Because if you think about it, the front end of your website, there's a hierarchy of information on the page, right? And that hierarchy of information exists for a reason. And that same hierarchy of information applies to when you're adding content for the page. And and, you know, it makes a lot of sense that you would enter the stuff that's at the top of the page first and the stuff that's at the bottom of the page last. And the stuff and the stuff that's optional later than the stuff that's required. And so often we've seen websites where people just create content types and add the fields and shove it out there without even thinking about that, you know? So I think it's there's so many things that are just like simple that if you take the time to think about, like they map so easily to the, to the work that we already do every day, and it's just the raising of the awareness part that I think is important.

Morgan Eck: Even something as simple as help text, you know, and writing good help text and having that in place can just make that content authoring experience so much better.

Greg Dunlap: Oh yeah. And that's another one of those places where, like when we write help text, I always try to focus on the why? Because, you know, enter the title here is not very useful help text or, you know, enter the meta description here. It's not very useful help text, especially when, as we see with many of our clients, they don't even know what a meta description is. And so entering, you know, so we try and write things like enter a short description of the page's content that will show when this page is shared to social media and search engines or something like that. Right. And at least that tells them what it is and how it influences what people are going to see which is which is the kind of thing that I think is much better. We see that like one of the ideas in Type Tray was to just was also to deliver more context about the the choices of content types and why you might want to choose a specific one over another one. And that's something that I think, again, you need, you need to bring a different attitude towards it, rather than just describing what it is that people are doing.

Matt Kleve: Yeah, that help text can be so important. I know that. Well, like in in the early days when people were like, oh, content strategy and Drupal and fields and, and then COPE was a thing right with the Create Once Publish Anywhere where you have fields that don't necessarily match up because your content may end up in lots of different places. But then when when I was working, or at least adding content to a site that was built in that manner, there are three different versions of the body field, and I don't know what the difference is between these three different versions. One of them is supposed to be shorter than the others, but beyond that, I don't know what's going on. So definitely, you know, there are ways, simple ways like help text, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah.

Matt Kleve: Yeah. To improve that experience.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's it's one of those things where it's like, I don't I don't think that a lot of the people who tend to end up on these projects are necessarily skilled wordsmiths. And you know, one of the things that I make the point of in the book and some of the talks that I've been doing, is that there's really a place for content people like professional content, people, you know, especially like think about the kind of people who write technical documentation to get involved and, you know, help with that communication that happens in the in the content authoring experience.

Matt Kleve: Who's your target? Who should be reading this book?

Greg Dunlap: That's the people I think are, again, the people who are creating these systems to begin with, the developers and the stakeholders who are behind the systems. But also I, I'm, I'm really targeting the people that I want to be involved in the process. Like, again, the content strategists, the content designers, the the UX designers, the people who bring those really user centric skills to the table. Like, I want to motivate them to get involved. And, you know, a lot of times these are the people also using the CMS on a day to day basis. So I would hope that from a self-interested standpoint, they would want to, you know, try and try and figure out how to improve these things and get themselves into the process for their own just state of mind.

Matt Kleve: Greg, you've you've worked on a lot of Drupal sites over, over time and even, you know, spent some time working on Drupal core. Is what is Drupal doing, right, as far as content authoring experiences go?

Greg Dunlap: I think a lot of what I like about what's Drupal has been doing recently is I think that our, our, our screens are very clean. They're very, you know, there's plenty of white space. I think they're well designed. And our content authoring tools are allow people who want to, to do the things that they want to like when you create we've got a lot of different kind of widgets and stuff like that, that we can use a lot of places that we can add help, text a lot. It's very easy through the admin UI to do all those things. You don't have to be a coder. You know, we talk in Drupal about this site builder role, which is somebody who has knowledge of the architecture of Drupal but isn't a coder but can still do a lot of stuff through the UI. And, you know, empowering that kind of type of user is really excellent. I would call out a lot of the work that's been done on the admin theme recently in Drupal and the work that Cristina Chumillas has been doing recently on the and the, on the new navigation for Drupal and the new sidebar, I think is going to be a really big improvement. So I think that there's a lot of that stuff that's really been helpful. Is the next question going to be about where we're struggling?

Matt Kleve: Yeah.

Morgan Eck: Yeah, I was going to say, what's the flip side?

Greg Dunlap: I think there are a couple of places where we struggle. One thing that really drives me crazy right now in Drupal is the way that we handle error messages. I was I made a video of this the other day, but basically I had a field with four required fields on it and two of them verified inline with JavaScript when you press submit and two of them required a page load to submit, and the ones with JavaScript they would, only once you hit the first error, it would stop. And so if you had two of the JavaScript errors, you would have to fix it and then resubmit. And then you'd get the second one, and then you'd fix it and resubmit, and then you'd get the form reload errors. And so it's like for four required fields, I had to submit the form three times. And that is ridiculous. It makes me absolutely. It's maddening. Because you shouldn't have to, like, submit a form and you should get all of the errors right there and it doesn't happen. And also, that functionality is so baked into Drupal that my impression is that it's kind of hard to actually fix from a site developer's standpoint. The messaging is also kind of hard to fix.

Greg Dunlap: And so that's the kind of thing where it's like, I am frustrated by it because not only is it broken? But I don't even have the opportunity to fix it myself. So that's that's that's one thing. I think another thing that we've struggled with, and this goes all the way back to when I first started with Drupal, is how we manage connected content. So, for instance, if you've got an author or a blog post and there's an author entity that you want to attach to that blog post, and so you write your blog post and then you go to add the author and the author, the person that you have to add who's a separate node type or content type or whatever isn't in the system already. Now what do you do? It's like you have to save your thing. Hopefully that's not required and then you have to save your thing. Go back out, create an author, come back to your thing, add the author. And it's so ridiculously painful. And the fact that we haven't come up with some kind of like, standardized solution for this extremely common problem is is endlessly frustrating to me.

Matt Kleve: When I make a note for a podcast episode on Lullabot.com one of the things is guests. And if a guest has not been on the show before, I need to create a bio external node or I don't remember if there's a difference between bio and bio external, but the interface shows that there is a difference. One thing we do is we do have inline forms, which is helpful. It prevents what you were you were saying. But the bio node is not exactly simple. And there's tons of fields and it's and it's visually kind of challenging when you know you have 17 more fields pop up.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah.

Matt Kleve: As a part inline to an already complex content type. So I think what you're describing is something that's a challenge.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, you know, even that inline form that you're talking about isn't a part of Drupal core. Like that's, that's a, that's a contributed module that you've got to do. And it's, this is a problem that I've never even seen really discussed in the Drupal core community as something that we should solve, which I think is kind of ridiculous. Like, you know, and a more ideal in my opinion, way to handle your situation would be to do it in a modal or a dialog or something like that, where you've got another interface that you can do that you should also be able to edit from that place and delete from that place, because it doesn't help if you can add something, but then when you need to change it, you've got to go find it again somewhere else, right? And so I think that is the kind of thing where, you know, we could come up with a solution in Drupal core that was fairly straightforward, and it wouldn't have to be the only solution, but it's at least there would be a solution there. And that that's like that's especially if you're designing a really well structured system. It's stuff like that is so, so irritating.

Matt Kleve: If we rewind real quickly to talk about your previous example with the error messages is there a chance that Drupal's error messages aren't the problem, but your form layout, that doesn't make clear that you have four required fields, the real problem?

Greg Dunlap: Sure. I mean, you know, it's very you you could definitely have a better way of communicating that. But on the other hand, I think a lot of a lot of authors especially, and, you know, this is really for new authors because after you filled out that form ten times, this isn't going to be a problem anymore. And so but when you're learning, it can be really it can be really kind of discombobulating, you know, and, and and the time when you're learning is actually, to me, the time when you should be most sensitive to people, right? Because they've already got enough to deal with if they're in a new system and a new content type that they've never dealt with before. And then even then, like, you'll forget stuff, you know, you'll you'll forget stuff. You'll be in a hurry. The system shouldn't, like, punish you for those things.

Matt Kleve: Is there a better way to to describe a field as required than just having a little red star?

Greg Dunlap: Probably. I was actually reading there's a guy named Adam Silver who's been doing a lot of talking and speaking, and he has a course on designing better forms, and his argument is that you should mark optional fields, not required fields. I don't necessarily know if I agree with that. One of the things that I like to do personally is I like to make fields required on publish rather than required on save, so that if somebody is working on a piece of content that they don't necessarily have all of the information for right now, they can start to fill it in and save it without all of the required fields. But then when they have to publish it, that's when the stuff has to be required, right? And so it gives people a little more freedom. It gives them a little more grace to work on something in, in, in an in-progress state without requiring all of the stuff that goes along with it. So that's another answer that I like a lot.

Matt Kleve: Which there's a there's a contrib module that does that. Right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. Yeah I think it's actually called Require on Publish if I recall correctly.

Morgan Eck: Yeah. I think so too [laughter].

Morgan Eck: You mentioned talks a little bit ago. Have you been doing talks recently that are kind of related to the topic of your book. Are those recorded somewhere?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, I did one at DrupalCon Pittsburgh last year and I did one at Drupal GovCon last year. They're both entitled Designing Content Authoring Experiences. And those are out there on the YouTubes. I linked to one of them in my Kickstarter. And I also did a talk at, the state of Georgia does a thing called Gov Talks every year, which is an internal conference that they do for their content authors. And I did a thing for that last year. That was a little more it's not about this, but it was kind of because one of the things that's kind of a struggle, I think, for a lot of modern organizations is that, you know, content on the web has gotten complicated. Like ten years ago when I was writing a content management system that was nothing more than a text area that you saved. I didn't have to worry about mobile friendliness. I didn't have to worry about SEO. I didn't have to worry about accessibility. I didn't have to worry about an organization's livelihood being dependent on the content that I was adding. And the web has gotten much more complicated since then, and that's one of the reasons why content management has become more complicated. Like, I actually think that content management as a concept has gotten simpler over the years. It's the content that's gotten more complicated, and the needs and the requirements on the content that's gotten more complicated.

Greg Dunlap: And I think one of the problems that a lot of organizations run into, and I would argue that this relates to content authoring experience, is that they are demanding a lot more of the content than their authors have the skill to manage. And you know, when you get, you know, a subject matter expert in an academic area of a university and you expect them to create content for, you know, a multi-channel audience that's accessible and mobile friendly and all of these other things. It's not realistic. It's not their job. Like, they shouldn't have to know those things because it's literally like, not what they were they're being paid to do. And you know, the argument that I make in this talk that I gave is that you should be hiring web content people to do your web content, because the needs of it are so are so different and so much more important that, you know, that's that's one of the ways that you can improve the experience of your authors is you can't expect them to know what they could never know in the first place. But that's, you know, more less of a technical problem and much more of an organizational change problem. And so, you know, I would argue that that talk has a lot to do with authoring experience, but probably not in the way that people are predicting.

Morgan Eck: Fascinating.

Matt Kleve: One thing I when I was looking at your Kickstarter it's not just the typical like when people are publishing a book, you get one book, you get two books. You could get Greg to speak to your audience right over, over zoom, or Greg can do consultation for you.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah!

Matt Kleve: I like the creativity there. Has anyone taken you up on those?

Greg Dunlap: I think all of my give a talks are gone.

Matt Kleve: Awesome.

Greg Dunlap: I've been thinking about adding some, I suspect. Well, I've been thinking about adding some, but I don't want to get overextended. You know one of the consultations is gone, basically. If you give $200 to my Kickstarter, I was saying I will come to your organization and give my authoring experiences talk, you know, perhaps slightly tailored to what you're interested in, and then do Q&A with a group of people. And then there was another one where I could get where I would give two hours of consultation to you on your project. And so I had originally done five of the give a talk ones, and I ended up expanding it to seven, and they're still all gone now. And then one of the consultation ones is gone as well. So that's all really great and and terrifying. You know [laughter].

Matt Kleve: No, it'll be good. I'm sure that it'll be educational for all involved. So that's exciting. So is this a a hit or miss kind of Kickstarter? If you make the number, then it's good. If you don't, you don't. Is that how it's set up?

Greg Dunlap: That's how all Kickstarters work. If you don't make the number that of your goal, then you get nothing. And I, you know, if I don't make the number of my goal that I need to get the book out, then I won't. And we'll see what happens after that. I really don't know.

Matt Kleve: Well, we'll make sure we've got that link to the Kickstarter. And hope there's a lot of people out there that are interested in supporting the book. I think it should be a good one.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, I really hope so, too. It's a really important topic. It's important to me, and I think it should be important to any organization that cares about, you know, quality content and communicating their message. So.

Matt Kleve: Anything else you'd like to add?

Greg Dunlap: I don't think so. Thanks a lot for having me on. And giving me the opportunity to talk about content authoring for everybody. Lullabot Podcast has a long and deep history. In as part of my content strategy work on the Lullabot website, I was recently going through the archives of the Lullabot podcast all the way back to the beginning, and it's really fascinating how it's really a history of Drupal going all the way back to the beginning and listening to a lot of the things and about a lot of the, you know, what were the topics of conversation at the time and the people who came through the podcast and stuff like that. It was really it was really, really cool and I'm really glad that this still exists. So thanks for keeping it going.

Matt Kleve: Thanks for joining.

Morgan Eck: Thanks for joining. Yeah.

Greg Dunlap: Yep. My pleasure.

Matt Kleve: Morgan, I've got good news for you.

Morgan Eck: Okay.

Matt Kleve: You made it through your second episode.

Morgan Eck: Yay!

Matt Kleve: I suppose we also have one more thing to do on our to do list. And that's reads Greg read Greg's book when it comes out.

Morgan Eck: Well, yeah, we're first on the list.

Matt Kleve: We're developers, and that's that's kind of his target. So we benefit.

Morgan Eck: We benefit greatly from his services. So looking forward to that.