Experience models
With Uniform, practitioners can work with data and content in entirely new ways. Before Uniform, combining content from multiple sources involved significant custom development and a lot of copying and pasting. Channel-specific content was put into systems of record, polluting the content model and creating technical debt. With Uniform, you can define and manage channel-specific content and select content from multiple sources to create something new in a visual editor, no code required.
For example, teams can combine short-lived campaign copy with the product name and description from a PIM or CMS with a dynamic connection that keeps everything up to date. The experience model gives this new content a place to live and the visual workspace provides the tools to manage and reuse it.
Uniform reflects an experience model, an expression of how content, data, and front-end applications work together to compose and deliver an experience.
Structured content#
Structured content is a key concept within content management for teams looking to embrace composable systems. Moving towards simple, channel-agnostic content models and away from proprietary, layout-based approaches frees teams to explore more complex UX and omnichannel experiences.
Content models are distinct from an experience model. They serve an important purpose, allowing for strategic content reuse and governance.
But when teams are working with systems that bring together information from multiple sources to build experiences for specific channels, they require an experience model.
The two models should work together. A system of record keeps content stable, clean, accurate, and up-to-date to maximize sustainability and reuse. A valuable experience must be flexible and include timely, channel-specific content.
By adopting an approach that recognizes the strengths of both models in a single visual workspace, you get the benefits of both: governance and consistency for content that's meant to be strategic and agility and flexibility for design and content that's meant to be tested or highly tailored.
Digital teams unfettered#
Without using a system like Uniform, organizations have to build workaround approaches themselves. Sometimes, presentation cues are added, such as color, alignment, or style, into the underlying content models to give creators some control. Other times these are baked into the front-end code by developers. In either case, these tasks are no longer in the hands of content creators and it becomes difficult to make changes over time as more and more logic becomes part of the content models or code.
One of the advantages of this experience model approach is that your teams can work in parallel. With content creators building on the experience layer while developers to start working against their components, structures, and content. When you choose to connect to underlying content at a later stage, the content delivered in the APIs stays the same, even if you swap out underlying content.