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Embedding video in documents is nice - on stellar Stellar the professor wanted to upload a series of introductory videos - but videos take lots of time to make and so not many users would use them.
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If we can make a way to visually edit documents that are as rich and structured as Wikipedia, Brett thinks it would be a big win.
Rishi the Admissions Blogger
Rishi is currently in his first year of graduate school for business. He is a coxswain in the crew team and also blogs for the Sloan admissions office. When making posts for the blog, he is frustrated by the difficulty of navigating to the correct page for actually putting in content. He finds he often has to search his email for esoteric links in order to get to the right place. He also avoids using pictures altogether because embedding media can make the formatting too difficult to be worth the effort of using media altogether. Some issues with embedding pictures is that resizing them can be extremely difficult, and if the original image size is used, the image often overflows the editor box.
When writing new blog posts, he often finds that what he sees when he writes is not what he gets when he hits the publish button. He would like “what you see is what you get”, or in other words, that what he sees when he’s editing text is exactly what’s published when he hits the “publish” button. Another issue he has with formatting the text is that the spacing is often not intuitive. Creating the correct number of spaces between different sections can often be very difficult and sometimes even require arbitrary control sequences (such as \n).
What blogging word processors currently do well:* easy to just write different paragraphs and put down your thoughts into text without any special formatting or using other media
Task Analysis
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How blogging word processors can be improved:* Would like shortcuts and more intuitive sections
- Would like to be able to embed images easily and meaningfully
- anchoring images to its position on the page, rather than letting them float or placing them inline with text