When Your Content Team Silently Quits Because Every Task Is a Nightmare
We talk a lot about “users” in UX. Personas. User journeys. Conversion flows. But here’s something that gets left out of a lot of those diagrams: your content editors are users too.
And when the CMS they depend on is confusing, restrictive, or actively hostile, they don’t just grumble. They disengage.
The Quiet Exit Strategy
It starts small. Someone asks, “How do I update this again?” No one remembers. The last person who knew left the company two months ago, and the process was never documented.
So the team moves the deadline. Then they move it again. Eventually, the update gets dropped, or worse, it lives forever in a shared Google Doc labeled “Staging Draft FINAL PLEASE REVIEW.”
No one is trying to sabotage the site. They’ve just decided it’s not worth the fight.
Every confusing interface. Every unpredictable edit. Every broken layout. It all chips away at their willingness to touch the CMS. Before long, your content team is still technically “maintaining” the site, but the updates are few and far between. You haven’t built a content workflow. You’ve built a haunted house.
From Friction to Full-Blown Rebellion
Of course, not everyone goes quietly. Some rebel.
They start hacking solutions together outside the CMS. Publishing via third-party tools. Spinning up unapproved microsites. Embedding tools like Canva, Typeform, or Notion, just so they don’t have to deal with whatever Frankenstein’s monster of a WYSIWYG your CMS is rocking.
It’s not sabotage. It’s survival.
When your CMS makes simple tasks feel risky, people go around it. It’s not just a governance problem. It’s a UX problem. And a trust problem.
Content Teams Deserve Real UX
We design thoughtful, accessible experiences for customers. But the people actually building and maintaining those experiences? They’re often stuck with messy side panels, unlabeled inputs, cryptic error messages, and workflows duct-taped together with permissions that don’t align with real team roles.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Your content workflow should be part of your CMS. Not a PDF floating around in Slack. Not a workaround in Jira. Concrete CMS lets you build a real approval process into your publishing flow. Editors, approvers, contributors—all with the right access and an interface they can actually use.
Want Proof This Is a Real Problem?
Just browse any UX forum where CMS comes up. This thread on r/UXDesign is a great example. Designers and editors alike echo the same pain points: clunky systems, poor workflows, and teams that avoid updates not because they’re lazy, but because the tools are awful.
A CMS should reduce friction. Not create it.
If your editors are ghosts or your designers are staging coups, it’s not a content problem. It’s a system problem.
Let them work in a platform that respects their role in the user experience because they’re users too.