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Home / Insights / ＿

The other user nobody designs for

There's an often overlooked audience in the website building space that platforms are finally starting to properly factor into the process.

Bridget Van Soest
Bridget Van Soest

02 October 2026

6 minute read

The number of “end users” for websites is expanding every year, and traditionally digital projects only focus on one of them.

The audience everyone talks about is the people visiting the website. Most agencies, Luminary included, spend a huge amount of their effort on that journey, from user experience and site performance, to accessibility and how straightforward the customer's life is at that moment.

Then there's the audience that does make it into the brief, usually as a line about easier content management and more flexible templates, but rarely gets the same attention once the project starts. That audience is the marketing team that has to actually run the thing. It’s the person in the office updating a promotion at 4.45pm on a Friday, or the content lead juggling five stakeholders' sign-off on one landing page.

Their 'user journey' is in the content management system, and for a lot of organisations, it's a miserable one. Marketers have to deal with siloed workflows, assets scattered across different platforms and a painful gap between 'what marketing wants to do' and 'what the platform lets them do easily'.

A beautiful, fast, accessible public site means very little if the people keeping it alive dread logging in. And unlike the public, the marketing team doesn't get to bounce to a competitor; they're stuck with the back end, every single day, for years.

There's a case for a third audience now too, with AI agents and answer engines reading and summarising websites on people's behalf. Our colleague Shayna Burns has written about creating AI-friendly content and staying visible in AI search, so we'll leave that one to her. This piece is about the audience that has been overlooked for much longer.

A new set of pain points to consider

The marketing team's journey is about ongoing friction in the small moments, like how long it takes to publish a page, how easy it is to get approval on content, how accessible reporting information is across the team, or how much has to be outsourced to the development agency because the marketers can't easily do it themselves.

Most mature digital agencies have a rigorous approach for the first public customer journey, consisting of UX research, personas, usability testing, the lot. Very few apply the same rigour to the second, even though the people living that journey are inside the building, on payroll, and directly shaping how well the public journey holds up over time.

Mapping the marketing team's journey

Taking the second journey seriously doesn't require inventing a new discipline. Workflow mapping borrows directly from customer-experience methodology, redirected at the marketing team instead. Asset mapping and taxonomy strategy are already internal-facing disciplines in their own right; content ops and information architecture have always been built around them. They just rarely get run on the marketing team's own working life with the same rigour they'd get on a client's site.

Workflow mapping is the most direct borrow, and it comes from a service design technique that the UX research firm Nielsen Norman Group has written about at length, the service blueprint, which splits a process into what the customer sees (the frontstage) and everything that has to happen behind the scenes to make that possible (the backstage), such as approvals, sign-offs, handoffs between teams, or someone waiting on someone else's calendar. Applied internally, a workflow map traces one piece of content from brief to publish and records where it actually stalls, whether that's the campaign sitting in a manager's inbox for four days or the asset needing sign-off from legal, compliance and the client in that order, with nobody able to see which stage it's stuck at. Very few teams have this written down anywhere. It mostly lives as shared experience, learned the hard way by whoever has been there longest.

Asset mapping is a plainer exercise. It means finding out where things actually live, not where the org chart says they should. For most marketing teams, that's a mix of a proper digital asset management system, a shared drive nobody fully trusts, someone's laptop, and a Slack thread with a file called 'final_v3_ACTUALFINAL'. Doing this properly tends to surface a shadow inventory of duplicated assets, expired approvals still circulating and campaign creative nobody can find because the person who made it has since left the business. Most teams that go looking find more of this than they expect.

Taxonomy strategy sits underneath both workflow and asset mapping , and is easy to skip because it's the least visible of the three. A taxonomy is simply a shared vocabulary, a consistent way of naming and tagging content and assets so a search returns what someone is actually looking for. Without one, reporting doesn't reconcile because nobody tagged campaigns the same way twice, content built for one campaign can't be found for the next, so someone rebuilds it from scratch, and every new hire spends their first month learning an unwritten filing system that lives in three people's heads. 

Get it right and the payoff goes beyond tidiness, because consistent tagging is what lets a team see which content is working and plan the next campaign around it. Skip this step and a platform migration doesn't fix the underlying problem; it just moves it somewhere new.

Platforms are starting to build for this

The CMS and DXP market has noticed this gap. A number of platforms are now investing directly in the marketing team's side of the experience rather than only the visitor's, treating workflow, findability and content operations as product features rather than something the client is left to solve with a training session.

Optimizely is one example. Its Content Marketing Platform (CMP) is largely built around the same three areas covered above, with shared calendars for workflow visibility, a searchable asset library, and structured approval chains. One G2 reviewer, an SVP of marketing, described their process before CMP as 'a game of email ping-pong', which is a fair summary of what an unmapped workflow tends to look like from the inside. Mark (formerly Opal), Optimizely's newer agent layer, extends into taxonomy and workflow too, with agents that can, for example, propose a content model directly from a Figma file rather than a developer having to translate a brief by hand. That said, none of this replaces doing the mapping work first. A platform applied to an unmapped process tends to automate the mess rather than remove it.

The question worth asking

Next time you're briefing a website project, or reviewing how one is performing, it's worth asking the second question as deliberately as the first. Not just 'will this feel great for our customers', but 'will this feel great for the people who have to run it too?'.

The answer usually starts with the map, not the platform. Understanding workflow, assets and taxonomy honestly, before choosing a tool, is what tells you what you actually need that tool to fix.

We'd love to help your team map that second journey, and work out where a platform like Optimizely CMP or Mark might close the gaps it reveals. Get in touch with the Luminary team if you'd like to talk it through.


Bridget Van Soest
Bridget Van Soest

02 October 2026

6 minute read

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