Gilbane San Francisco to be held April 10 - 12

The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA

The popular Gilbane Conference series returns to San Francisco this spring with a greatly expanded collection of educational programs, including tracks focused on web and other enterprise content management applications, enterprise search and information access technologies, publishing technology, wikis, blogs and collaboration tools, and information on globalization and translation technology. During this event, attendees will learn how to apply the right technologies to their business application from experienced content management practitioners, consultants, and technologists. This is the premier content management event for business and technology decision makers who are looking for strategic, technical and market opportunities in the expanding field of content management.

Glenn Barnett, Principal Consultant, Engineering at Molecular will present a session on Navigation Usability including Faceted Navigation:

Creating an on-site navigation where users can easily and quickly find exactly what they are looking for is key to a successful web site: to improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales. During this session Glenn Barnett will share his extensive insight on how to implement faceted navigation, and more importantly how to achieve the most user-friendly results without having to do their own usability testing. This presentation share’s Molecular’s discoveries on how to make the interface to facets more intuitive and usable to poor, unsuspecting users, through our extensive usability testing and log file analysis. During this presentation, attendees will garner how to ensure that users discover and understand faceted navigation, which design best practices to implement, so that their users can easily select facets, understand the results, and make changes to selections and other options for meeting user expectations, such as sorting and comparing.

Evan Gerber, Senior Consultant, User Experience at Molecular will present the session, “Give Me Usability, or Give Me Death!” on the usability of content management systems:

On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry slammed his fist on a lectern in colonial Richmond VA, and thundered “Give me liberty, or give me death!.”  His rousing speech led the colonies into open rebellion against King George III, altering the course of history forever. Content management owners are faced with a similar, albeit prosaic, life or death choice.  Does one invest the extra time and cost into creating a usable administrative interface for their CMS?   While it might not lead to revolution, the decision could lead to lower TCO versus lost revenues.

Ease of use is crucial to the success of any data driven website.  Business owners are careful to consider usability for the customer-facing website, but often neglect to consider the crucial backend.   Business users are extremely busy people who keep the lifeblood of the site circulating.  If the admin website is not designed specifically for them, the website will fail.  Design for your business users as carefully as the people coming to browse the front end, because you won’t have one without the other. 

Molecular content management expert, Evan Gerber share tips and approaches to consider as the website moves through its lifecycle.  From design to maintenance, there are inexpensive ways to incorporate the needs of the business users, and serious repercussions if they are ignored.

For more information or to register, visit Gilbane San Francisco.