Introduction
The Joomla Content Management System (CMS) is an extremely popular CMS with 2.7% of the world’s websites using it to create and update content.
Joomla is an open source application. This means that it is a community built application and is constantly developing by the community based on the feedback it receives.
However Joomla is not considered to be a popular choice for new users with most preferring to use WordPress as it’s considered to be a much more user-friendly application.
Joomla has a reputation for being a more powerful CMS compared to WordPress especially for e-commerce but a much more complex one to learn so are there ways that this stigma that Joomla has acquired be alleviated?
So what discourages a new user from embracing Joomla as their preferred CMS and how can the current User Interface (UI) be improved in future versions to support new users while keeping existing solid community.
This coursework explores what type of user experience the current UI provides for new users to complete basic tasks such as page creation and menu alteration through user testing and a user journey and provides wireframes and prototypes on potential ways to improve that user experience.
Research
There are a vast number of CMS’s in the world today as most organisations use them in order to be able to update the content of their website quickly without the need for expertise in web design. The first task is to establish what type of people use what type of CMS and based on that research gather a small group to do some user testing on the design.
Based on the results of the user testing a user journey is built to locate pain points in the current design.
Design
Once the pain points have been established a set of wireframes were created to resolve these problems. To ensure that the wireframes achieve this some Chalkmark (first-click) tests were done to evaluate user interaction.
Prototype
A working prototype has been created to demonstrate some of the functionality expected from the design.
An App prototype has also been created which achieves the abililty to perform some of the basic tasks within Joomla. A guerilla user test has also been performed on this to identify any potential issues within the design of the App.