Tools for Tastemakers
I was giving a demo to an editor at New York magazine yesterday when something interesting happened that reminded me of what a crappy experience content creators on the web have had for the last 10 years when it comes to the power of the browser-based tools we use for our daily work.
As I was showing him the way an implicit design grid and layout manager interact to constantly keep your work in balance, the art director at the magazine walked by the conference room we were in, and because my host was particularly effusive, was dragged in and made to sit through the demo. “Look,” the reviewer kept saying to him, “you can drag this corner and it all reflows! You can flip this text with the photo like this and you can even get this in print!” The guy looked decidedly nonplused and at the end of it what seemed like an eternity to me simply stated: “So? This is the way all of my desktop tools work” followed by the real kicker: “this is the way the web should have always worked.”
Flying back to Boston, I realized two things. First, he’s absolutely right: if we really do believe in a future where everyone can be a content creator, the web needs to start working a lot more like our critic expects it to. The editing experience of any kind of online content not only needs to be easy and intuitive and automated where possible, but also much more powerful. And in what is perhaps a controversial statement that we’ve been making since the beginning of Tabblo— the resulting end product needs to look good. Taste is absolutely subjective, but ask anyone about their impressions of MySpace— anyone— and it won’t take 5 minutes for them to get on to how heinous or tacky most of the profile pages on the site are.
Is that because of all of the people on MySpace suffer from an utter lack of taste? It is very hard to make this argument as the userbase approaches 100 million; more likely, the range of creative expression that the MySpace tools offer is what forces everyone’s page to look like Geocities after the “Great Blink Tag Rage of ‘96.”
My second realization was equally important; we’ve got a set of models for what these tools need to look like in the creative suites most art departments use today. Just like iMovie was borne out of Avid machines and Garageband out of Pro Tools, we’ve still got a lot to learn from Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and friends. True, these tools are barely accessible to mere mortals, and the constraints of the web really do make one rethink fundamental interaction patterns (hello Gmail!), but the deeper we get into building the One True Multimedia Editor to Rule Them All, the more we find ourselves re-implementing primitives from desktop publishing tools (i.e., unlimited undo, layers, property panes)— albeit in more accessible forms.
We always estimated that it was going to take 18 months to get the editor to where we wanted it to be— not only because it just takes that long to write and refine software— but because without you guys hammering on it everyday and giving us lots of explicit and implicit feedback, we’d end up a camel and not a horse. So for being 120 days into it, we’re pretty happy. After all, we’ve been amazed by the expressive power that most of you have managed to flex in using Tabblo to make cool stuff. However, we’re probably only 5% of the way to where we want to be in terms of the tool— and it’s good to be reminded of this by tastemakers who do this for a living.
Now back to work…