It’s The Editor, Stupid!

 

From the Creating Passionate Users blog:

Do you know what the “comma-stupid” phrase is for your product or service? In other words, do you know what is most meaningful for your users? Because whatever that word or phrase is (i.e. the part that comes before the “, stupid!”), it should be driving everything from product development to documentation to support and marketing.

More and more I’m seeing people value the editor in a system over anything else. When Rob joined Ephox he switched to WordPress because among other things:

Given that AJ has done the work of making Edit Live with WordPress, I can use a real editor.

At Lotusphere, Ephox’s IWWCM integration took out the Best in Lotusphere Showcase award which is exciting in itself, but as Damien comments:

To me it signals realization of the importance of rich word processing applications for the web and how these applications can make the task of getting content online so much easier.

 Remember too, that IWWCM comes with a WYSIWYG editor, so the users weren’t getting excited about not having to learn crufty formatting syntax – they were getting excited because their editing experience was improving so much that suddenly instead of fighting the program they were in flow. Instead of spending their days trying to work out how to make the editor behave, they were kicking ass.

So with all this user generated content flowing around Web 2.0 and all of us being Time people of the year, when are the vast majority of tools going to actually provide a kick-ass editing experience for their users?