Good design days

I love days like today!

Today I've been redesigning some of our internal content management pages and have simplified the process for keyword searching massively.

We used to ask the content editors to select the keywords they want to assign to a particular topic from a list. Obviously (why we didn't see this before I'll never know) when the keyword list get large it becomes a mammoth task to select the appropriate ones.

In a eureka moment I realised that the Content Editors were just matching keywords to words in the topic title and/or content - a process which could be easily automated - so that's what I've decided to do.

The icing on the cake is that any new keywords are compared against the current keywords to make sure that there are no duplicates, then a process is run to match it to any relevant topics automatically.

The content editor no longer need to worry about dealing with keywords, they just add them when they want and the system will do the rest. This frees the content editor up to do what they want to do, author content.

Whist this sort of searching problem has been solved many times before it highlights why I love interaction design so much, instead of just painting the corpse I looked past the UI problems and simplified the whole process, making the system work for the Content Editor. Not the other way round.