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Text/Section boxes - gave all boxes (including images) an ‘x’ on mouseover, which is a universal symbol for deleting things, which is also very learnable. Also made adding specific text boxes as easy as clicking a button on the left universal toolbar, and adding new paragraph boxes as easy as pressing enter in a pre-existing box, much like new paragraphs should work (which is also very learnable)
Formatting Toolbar - we had a formatting toolbar that appears across the top of the main page screen whenever a user is editing some text. We made sure that the toolbar would remain across the top of the screen no matter where the user was scrolled on the page (absolute positioning). We also made sure the buttons in the toolbar acted like buttons, and would have obvious activated, deactivated, and mouseover effects. After the heuristic evaluation, we took many of the suggestions on improving the formatting toolbar to meet the specifications of a robust toolbar. The evaluator gave us helpful feedback about the buttons affording buttons, the effects being consistent, and making sure everything was implemented correctly. We tried to bring everything up to all these specifications with our final design.
Implementation:
We mostly just used jquery and contenteditable. Other useful software tools we used were HTMLCanvas and Coffeescript. We had a backend in Ruby on Rails but never really got into implementing much of the overhead required to use it.
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