Can’t Charge For A Better Editor?

A while back I saw a comment go by that raised my interest, it was something along the lines of: we know all our users want a better editor, but it’s just not something we can charge more for. My recent experience with Yojimbo and what I’ve seen of a number of people evaluating blogging systems, content management systems and anything else content-centric, tends to indicate that even if you can’t charge more, you’ll definitely sell more.

If Yojimbo had an awesome editor for it’s notes, I would have bought it at twice the price, even without any of the other functionality being up to scratch for what I wanted. It would be so useful to have a central location to store notes, with an awesome editor to quickly edit them that I’m thinking of writing such a system myself. A home-grown solution would lack all the polish that Yojimbo has, but I’d use an off the shelf, top of the line editor so 99% of the time I used the app I’d be getting a smooth, polished experience.

Similarly, blogging systems live and die by whether or not they provide a good experience for writing posts. You can make most blogging systems provide whatever output you want to the end user, it’s the admin side of it that users see most. What part of the admin system do they spend the most time in? The post editor.

Wikis are even more editor-centric. Again, getting the output to be readable and searchable is a pretty simple task that pretty much every wiki does pretty well at – making it smooth and intuitive to edit pages is where wikis originally shine and where there is a lot of potential for improvement. Providing a plain text field and wiki markup just isn’t good enough anymore.

More and more, people are judging mail clients based on their editor too. Sure, I still prefer plain text email but the rest of the world is falling in love with rich formatting and you’d better bet they want their mail clients to provide top notch editors for crafting their messages. Apple cottoned on to this with their ready-made templates in Mail for OS X 10.5. I’m going to hate that feature with a passion but you bet it will be hugely popular.

The editor is where the user spends all their time, so don’t underestimate the amount of power it has in a purchasing decision. The number of places where editor technology is becoming crucial to the user experience is growing every day and the more you hear about user generated content, the more important editors are becoming.