Socialtext updates their UI

Posted on July 24, 2006
Filed Under Companies, Wikis |

One of the complaints that is often heard about Socialtext is that the user interface is not well designed. I’m not going to disagree with this sentiment, in fact I have said as much to Ross, but at the same time I want to recognize that the company has not been sitting idle. Beginning next month you will see some significant updates to Socialtext, both the hosted service and the enterprise version.

It is also important to dig into the “UI sucks” complaint to understand what exactly people are referring to when they refer to user experience. Let’s be clear about one thing, Socialtext arguably has the broadest feature set of any of the major wiki platforms, enabling blogging, e-mail integration, security, embedded feeds, and much more; it’s a challenge to design a user interface for an application with a deep feature set. From my own experience I would say that the text editor is the center of any frustration I have, I would like to see wikiwyg enhanced in many ways, including more predictability in the “simple” mode, support for inline attachments, better image support, and a customizable toolbar that enables the user to select what editor features they want displayed.

The planned integration of Wikicalc into Socialtext will also provide a significant boost in capabilities in one other area that the editor is currently weak in, tables. Needless to say, a true spreadsheet capability in a wiki will also represent a major advance on their competitors.

One exciting new capability that will go a long way to quenching user interface complaints is the ability to do custom CSS templates. Quite often complaints about any user interface are really complaints about the way it looks, having a template capability and library will definitely cover that concern. Here’s a couple of screenshots of some templates that Socialtext has already developed.

UPDATE: I was remiss in not pointing out that Socialtext also released a open source version of their software today.

St Sshot 1-1

St Sshot2

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