Preview is a way for the authors and editors to get a sense of not only how their work is presented, but more importantly, perceived. We think of preview as “empathy portals”, as tools that make authoring easier by letting you relate to the user experience.
Looking at previews this way forces the question: Why should previews then be restricted to just a web preview? If your content will end up in different places in front of different people, shouldn’t that inform how we accommodate previews in the CMS? Content strategists such as Karen McGrane and Jeff Eaton raised this question over half a decade ago, but it still seems to us, that previews are mostly thought of in terms of seeing how changes look like on the website. At least, there is where the current innovation and energy goes.
We want to broaden and challenge the established ideas of what previews in a CMS can be. So we made an array of examples of different previews that we hope can be of use and inspiration.
And of course, we'll start with the obvious example, just to get that out of the way.