ONLYOFFICE Editors design Pt.1: Six sustaining principles of building the user interface

We are going to launch our blog with a story about the cornerstone of every solution: creation of user interface.

Daily usage of common productivity tools has become so mechanical that you are not likely to imagine Undo button looking any different than an arrow, or a toolbar attached below document canvas. But behind every move there is a principle, and this article is a quick guide to what stands for the UI design strategy.

Finding a beginner’s advantage

Prior to everything, offering some new treat is a ticket to the bus. In our case a head start was an idea of using HTML5 that still came as a dark horse among technologies at that time, back in 2009. We discovered that Canvas largely enhances interactivity experience and boosts responsive speed of the interface, thus letting us to stand out from other editing suites.

Tuning in to the competition

Needless to say, a tech company that doesn’t investigate rival products is a Cock and Bull Story. It is as important as studying history at school. However, as in history, the goal is to be aware of no-goes and to discover ways for improvement.

While examining a particular function in the competing product, there is always the implementation process one should take into account. The main answer we seek is not for a question How? but for a question Why? Only thorough analysis and elaboration of the entire concept allows to fully estimate the compatibility of a mechanism and to find out if it fits general logic of the system.

Obeying the unspoken rules

What notably defines our dependency on the existing solutions is also an element of the industry. People do not seek options to learn new approaches to their routine. Some patterns are standards de facto, to name a few: familiar text, paragraph and paste formatting tools, side allocation of various editing panels, File menu and its contents, hot keys array in context menus, etc. To change those means to rudely interrupt daily work of millions.

Seeking the knowledge within

No surprise, we do use ONLYOFFICE ourselves for working purposes on a daily basis, becoming our own clients and beta-testers. Creation of a product constantly involves element of discussion that frequently gives birth to completely new forms of what was initially planned. This is indeed a big deal of work, however most likely leading to positive outcome.

Thinking globally

Customer needs are fundamental, however every product also has a need: to be improved and to be integrated with other components. A consent with future development stimulates additional research in process of product creation. For instance, while working on DocBuilder (a tool for creating document templates), we left over a core of its structure to introduce the modification in CRM that will allow building report templates, as well as templates for invoices. Coming soon!

Defining the milestones

Granted, in every industry there are always 20% of functionality that, once obtained, spur businesses to start looking for a more narrow audience. When the basic functions are elaborated and the time has come to develop something more specific. Generally speaking, we can call the current stage of our Document Editors development a transitional period, since the basics are already in pocket and the real work has begun.

Head to our next article to find out how these six principles determined our desktop solution as it is today, utterly in practice.