You can either start your day by thinking, "oh no" or "Eureka."
Last week, we decided as a team that the editor in our community platform will go for a spin. Writing is the core action any user performs in a community, and if that experience isn't great, the product fails. The problem with the existing design
We tried tons of revisions over the next 48 hours. What we decided or thought to be the solution is grouping. We have got to find a family for each of these tools and group them. For example, Bold, Italics, Strikethrough can be part of the Font Family. We did this, and still, the user has to go through from left to right over 8 different sets of families. And the box kept interrupting the experience.
The next morning, the designer from my team wakes up watching a bird on his window. It was just chirping, and right when he got closer to it, it flapped its wings and flew away.
Inspiration:
A. Birds got two wings for the sake of balance.
B. They hide them until they need them.
Result:
A. The editor toolbox will have two wings—the Post icon in the middle separating the two sections. The left has control over styling your content like fonts, alignment. The right section helps you insert anything new like an image, code block, or video.
B. The toolbox won't show up until the user writes and hides when the user scrolls down to read.
How can I not appreciate his observation? He just transformed our editor design into something cool. You can read more on this probably with images here
https://community.habitate.io/posts/78/release-update-rich-text-editor-20
and if you want to try the new editor experience, then try signing up at create.habitate.io