We've been evolving the Amaxus CMS for nearly ten years, so when we came to perform a major update to the user interface for version 4, we had a wide range of experience to draw on and a wonderful customer base to help with our research.

Following our User Centered Design approach, we asked users with a range of CMS experience (from none to advanced) to perform pre-set tasks with various software systems, and analysed their behaviours.

Distilling the results, we identified three distinct modes of use:

• Task based. These users, typically novice CMS users, wanted to 'find a document' or 'create an event', and expected the terminology of the application to match the task at hand.
• Application based. These users, typically more experienced with content management systems or similar software packages, wanted to access a specific environment for completing each task, such as you might use Microsoft Word to create or edit a document, or Keynote to produce a presentation. To these users, the simpler task-based terminology was more patronising, and given the greater number of options required to support task-based terminology, slowed down these application-based users (who wanted to identify their task from a smaller number of applications).
• Search based. The third mode of use, which consisted of users with varying experience and expertise, seems born from the Google generation. When performing certain tasks, users did not want to access any application or browse menus, but instead wanted to query/search for the relevant solution/content.

Part of our vision for Amaxus is to allow a user to do what they want, when they want, how they want. We therefore built in support for all three common modes of use, through clear menu labels (which actually access mostly the same functionality, just through different routes) and an always-accessible Universal Search.