Many online professionals consider a text editor intuitive, easy to use and something which doesn’t require any training or documentation. Most text editors in web applications resemble the familiar and to most people intuitive interface from Microsoft Word. Despite this Martin Risgaard Rasmussen, a webmaster at the Danish dairy giant Arla Foods, decided to create a cheat sheet for his online editors when they introduced a new text editor.
You can download the cheat sheet below.
Based in corporate communication, Martin says that “occasional editors are easily overwhelmed as many of the features contain several different options”. With 15,000+ employees, Arla has many irregular editors who will work with the new text editor. Martin is also working on a more extensive documentation for the editors.
Arla is beginning to use the open source TinyMCE editor, which has been customised to meet their requirements, including integration with SAP KM and SAP’s Web Page Composer.
It is often presumed that learning by trial-and-error is the preferred approach for online professionals. This may be the case for the advanced super users who are familiar with many interfaces and systems, but do remember that in larger organisations super users represent only a tiny minority and most others are still not familiar and comfortable editing web pages.
Download the TinyMCE cheat sheet from Arla:
- Adobe PDF (357 Kb)
- Microsoft Word format (57 Kb)
Niels Hartvig August 23rd, 2010 10:15
(Disclamer: I’m the founder of Umbraco – an open source web CMS)
I never understood why so many CMSes enables all these functions.
- Font formatting and colors? No way, at most a dropdown with approved formatting rules (css classes but hidden in names that makes sense such as “Red Text”, “Big Header”) etc. We need semantic markup and a consistent styles and editors should focus on content not looks.
- Three paste buttons? Why not combine them into one (or at least remove those that shouldn’t be used)
- Insert time/date? As raw text which is likely to potentially cause issues on sites in multiple language
- etc. I’ve even seen CMSes where “Emoticons” (yes, those silly smiley icons) are enabled by default
In Umbraco we use tinymce but we’ve done a ton of work on customizing pasting and formatting. We’ve also made it possible to have multiple versions of tinymce for different types of content where you select the buttons that should be shown. All editable via point and click.
Sometimes you wonder if vendors even use their systems to add content.
Martin Mouritzen August 23rd, 2010 10:15
(Disclaimer: I’m the founder of the SiteLoom CMS)
I agree with Niels. Why in the world is there a button with the “cheat tip”: “Avoid this one.” – It would be faster to phone your developer and disable the button.
Most of the time less really is more.
Also, “HTML Mode” and “Path” (where you can see what html-node you’re currently in) should be disabled for non-power users, who will not understand the information anyway. – Displaying all that information makes the learning curve steeper and is probably the reason why “cheat sheets” are needed to begin with.
Martin Risgaard August 23rd, 2010 10:15
The Cheat Sheet will be the centerpiece of the switch to the new editor, but it will also be supplemented with more traditional training sessions. However, the underlying message to all editors is that they have to go an play with the editor, and even if they don’t it will not be that different from the old and from what they know in Word.
@Niels Good points. We have done some customisation, but for various reasons this has mainly disabling irrelevant functions.
Martin Risgaard August 23rd, 2010 10:15
@Martin M When you have the 1-on-1 dialogue with the users, my experience is that people focus on what they need and forget the rest. Exactly you do when you use eg. Excel where most people only use a fraction of what’s available.
You need to find a common denominator which covers both simple and advanced users. If I disable the HTML view I would lose a very useful tool, and disabling it for some and not for others is not really an option.
Martin Mouritzen August 23rd, 2010 10:15
Martin Risgaard:
Sure, i appreciate that, but wouldn’t it be an idea to be able to enable/disable it based on permissions or groups. Or maybe even an attribute “knows HTML” on the user?
Niels Hartvig August 25th, 2010 10:15
@MartinM: I use to think that customization was the way forward too, but there’s actually a big downside of heavy customization (especially in larger organizations).
It makes it hard to do documentation and to do support when different people have different editions of the rich text editor (and other parts of the UI). You remove a common language so to speak.
I’ve learned that the best way forward is trying to keep things simple but not locked down while making sure that the system handles any violation of rules (for instance cleaning invalid html in the editor, stripping out script tags if not allowed, etc.)
Martin Risgaard August 25th, 2010 10:15
Agree with Niels. In large organisations you need to keep things at simple as possible – “Simple, but not locked down” is a great way of seeing it.
If you start customizing you enter a slippery slope and you may very well find yourself in a jungle of roles and groups even if you started out with the best of intentions.
Michael Hafner August 31st, 2010 10:15
thanks for publishing that.
I’m just about to finalize our version of a quickstarter documentation for the cms – nbut we call it a cookbook – I just think it sounds nicer: more positive, less illegal – for a bank…:)
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