It’s been a year since Kin implemented its first text editor, and a lot has changed since then.
We’ve released our Objectives and Reviews features, taken a fresh approach to PTO, and made a long list of under-the-hood technical changes to improve the site’s speed and efficiency. What started out as a simple tool to format text is now an important feature of the site – one our users lean on to share important content. With this in mind, we decided it was time to take another pass at this essential tool and streamline it. Here’s the final product in action:
Fixing Bugs
There were a few minor but persistent issues embedded in our previous editor (combining bold/italics, styling content in lists) and we’ve ironed those out. We’re leveraging a new editor library that is much more stable and customizable to our customer’s needs. In addition, we now store all users content in clean, semantic HTML, removing the need to translate it to any another format.
Pruning the Features
After taking a hard look at the most-used editing tools provided to our users, we chose to prune it down to the essentials by removing the heading styles (H1, H2, H3). This decision was inspired by Basecamp’s editing experience, which limits users to a core feature set. This also sidesteps a handful of technical issues such as styling headers, and embedding headers in lists. Note to our users – any headings you’ve already saved in Kin will be transformed into simple bold text.
Minimal UI
We also decided to do away with the sticky toolbar, in favor of a Medium-inspired popup toolbar. This helps keep the interface clean and minimal. Kin users will be able to identify editors by the double border up top, and the formatting tooltip in the bottom right corner.
What’s Next?
We follow a pattern with all our features at Kin: implement, observe, iterate. Once we put something out there, we keep close tabs on customer feedback, bug tickets, and site analytics to gauge how well a feature is serving our users. When we identify something that can be better – we improve it. Simple as that.
If you have any feedback on our new text editor – please drop us a line and let us know. We always love to hear from our customers.