Symphonious

Living in a state of accord.

Category Archives: Ephox

A Scary Thought

While reviewing some screen mockups for EditLive! today, it occurred to me just how limited an environment we’re forced to work in. It turns out that the default, and thus most common, size of a rich text area in IBM WCM is 740×450 (note to Ephoxians, I mistakenly quoted this as 740×360 earlier so we have slightly more vertical space than I thought).  Even in my blog’s editing interface, the editor is 718×600.

That doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the iPhone has a screen that’s 480×320.

Now an extra couple of hundred pixels width makes a huge difference, but when you look at how much time people spend trying to strip out functions and minimize UI in iPhone apps, it’s scary to think that we aim to pack the functionality of Microsoft Word into that kind of space.

I think the only reason we manage it is by providing real drop down menus, whereas most in-browser editors just try to cram everything on to the toolbar. At least I know why UI design for EditLive! is such a challenge…

Ephox Meme: 5 Favorite Features

The Ephox bloggers have been way too quiet lately (myself included) so I thought I’d start an Ephox meme. What’s your 5 favorite features of any of Ephox’s products?  They might be built in or plugins that we’ve developed, maybe even features of our internal systems that make your life easier, but preferably something that our clients could get hold of (teasing people just isn’t nice).

Here’s my list:

  1. Built-in Image Editor. Particularly being able to resize an image and add rounded corners and drop shadow.
  2. Pop out window mode. More editing space is always good.
  3. Automatically detecting URLs on the clipboard and using them as the default value in the hyperlink dialog.
  4. Styles menu. Not that I use it on this blog, but having access to classes in the site style sheet make it so easy  to apply some really nice formatting with just a couple of clicks.  The styles package prototype we use internally a lot is particularly useful for this.
  5. The extensible APIs. It’s so nice to be able to quickly add support for footnotes, a shiny button generator or whatever I happen to want this week. I wish more clients used this functionality to make life easier for their users – even if it was just by providing a handful of simple templates they could insert.

I tag Suneth, Damien and Brett…

One Line Toolbar

I was going to write a post around accessibility and WCAG 2.0 but got annoyed once again about the EditLive! toolbar taking up two lines instead of one.  I’d already removed a whole bunch of stuff from it but it was still wrapping around by a few buttons.

It occurred to me that there are a range of functions that I had on the toolbar because I use them frequently, but that aren’t actually required because I always use the keyboard shortcut. In particular, I have no need for cut, copy, paste, undo or redo because without exception I use keyboard shortcuts. I could probably apply the same logic to strong, em and insert hyperlink as well but my toolbar fits on one line with them so they may as well stay.

Here’s what it looks like:

  • Styles
  • Insert hyperlink
  • Insert image
  • Strong
  • Emphasis
  • Insert unordered list
  • Insert ordered list
  • Decrease indent (actually I always use shift-tab anyway)
  • Increase indent (ditto but for tab)
  • Insert table (useful on the toolbar so you can just drag out the size instead of going through a dialog)
  • Pop out into a new window – great for getting that extra space you need to see what you’re doing.

Everything else is still available in the menus if I need it, but the toolbar is reserved for really quick access to common stuff – just like it should be.

This leads me to Sutton’s first law of editors:

The perceived value of an editor for purchases changes in proportion to the number of buttons on the toolbar, whereas the actual value of an editor for authors changes in inverse proportion to the number of buttons on the toolbar.

Thus, editor vendors should add as many buttons to the toolbar as possible to show off the functionality and nearly all of these should be removed before you actually put it into production. Note however that this is about toolbar buttons, not features – I use an awful lot more functionality than what is on the toolbar but not commonly enough to need to move it out of the menus. This minimal toolbar simply wouldn’t work with an editor that didn’t also have a menu bar.

Note to self: I really must add a good style for highlighting important sections like the law above.

Further note to self: Also need a good style for these notes to self.

Note to engineers: I love how easy it is to add drop shadows with the inline image editor. Finally even lazy people like me can join the Web 2.0 drop shadow revolution! Fantastic work.

What People Want

Ephox provides a bunch of different sites with feeds to help people keep up to date about what’s happening with our software and the company.  For example, LiveWorks! helps you learn more about our products and get the most out of them, the releases blog keeps you up to date with the latest stuff and the official Ephox blog has all the company news. Then of course there’s a range of blogs by Ephox employees like this one and they’re all gathered up at People@Ephox. So guess which feed is the most popular by far?

Yep, People@Ephox. Now, People@Ephox obviously includes the posts from all our official blogs so you get the hints and tips from LiveWorks!, the release notifications and the official company news but the majority of posts that come through are from employee’s blogs discussing random stuff from Guitar Hero, to rebuilding PCs, touring around the Australian outback and even sometimes talking about work. Add to that the fairly significant number of visits to the actual People@Ephox site as well and it’s even more impressive.

Personally, I think that’s fantastic. To be honest, when I put together People@Ephox, I didn’t really expect it to be that popular – almost just checking off the “hip company that cares about it’s users” list. We do genuinely care about our users and I’m always looking for ways to stay in touch with them and make sure they’re getting the most out of our products but I would have thought the majority of people these days would only be interested in the more official sites. I tend to subscribe to employee’s blogs for companies that I deal with, but everyone keeps telling me how unusual I am. At least in this case they’re not entirely right (though in many others they definitely are).

Companies spend a huge amount of time building up contact lists and trying to get clients to opt-in to receive newsletters and whatever else and while they certainly go out to far more people than People@Ephox does, there’s a really important difference.  People@Ephox really hasn’t done anything to make it easy to opt-in to. There’s no email subscriptions, no fancy Web 2.0 buttons to subscribe in a million different web based readers, not even the marketing department obligatory call to action, just an RSS feed, and people subscribe.  I’ll bet (hope) they’re far more interested in the content too.

So to all of our clients, partners and users who come to read this – thanks for taking an interest. I’d love to stay up to date with you and your companies too so please do post the URL to your blog in the comments whether it’s official or unofficial and even if it never mentions anything to do with EditLive!

UPDATE: Since it’s so easy to do, now you can subscribe via email. Just visit the site, put your email address in the box, solve the captcha and click the link in the email you get. Don’t forget to thank the spammers for making the internet such a pain…

Build vs Join

Kevin Gamble:

I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, but the message just isn't sinking in. What's it going to take for people to "get" this? A million dollars or 10 million dollars. It doesn't matter. The people are not coming. You have to go to them. It's pretty simple actually.

The thing is, corporate thinking is all about owning stuff. So the natural tendency is to want a community that you “own” and thus you have to build a new community and get people to come. It’s nice to see some studies highlighting how rarely that actually works though.

Now this isn’t to say that you should tear down all your web properties and start using FaceBook pages instead – it just means that you have to go over to FaceBook or where ever your users hang out and interact with them there. You can still publish useful content on your own site and link to it as appropriate, just don’t expect your site to become the hub of the community.

I find the third key problem from the Wall Street Journal article Kevin references resonates a lot with me:

The third problem with online communities is how businesses go about measuring the success of their communities. Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.

The thing about word of mouth is that it quite often is just that – words from people’s mouths. It’s not called spreading news by links to web pages or by visiting sites – it’s word of mouth and that’s incredibly hard to track. Unless you’re insanely caught up in the blogging craze you have to realize that people are more likely to recommend your products by speaking with others, or via email or IM than they are to actually publish a web page that links to yours and recommend people go join up to your community. Most companies focus on something other than creating a community site and it’s that original product that gets recommended, even if it’s because of the community site.

For example, LiveWorks! receives very little traffic when compared to the main Ephox website, but it’s still very high up the list of referring sites but more importantly when you talk to people and say that there’s a ton of information and early access to our products on LiveWorks! they think that’s fantastic and are far more likely to recommend our editors – which live on ephox.com.

Of course, LiveWorks! doesn’t really try to be a community site – it allows comments and provides a mailing list/forum but really it’s a great big collection of useful content about our product. You can’t create an account or a profile there even though we’ve talked about doing something like that. This kind of research makes me realize why that’s never seemed like an absolute must-do idea for me.

Now the question is, where is the community around our products and how do we best go out and join it?