Is WYS Always WYG?
Experimenting with Microsoft Sway and narrative tutorials
We spend a lot of time writing at GCFLearnFree. Whether we’re planning a tutorial, scripting a new video, or just trying to make each other laugh, we’ll usually start by writing something.
Lately we’ve been thinking about how we write, including the tools we use to do it. And even though all of our content is written for the Web, I struggle to start any kind of project without writing on paper, preferably with one of these Mirado Black Warrior pencils:
Some of my coworkers are partial to roller-ball pens; others reserve their handwriting skills for the rare sticky note and do most of their planning with simple text documents (TextEdit, Notepad, Google Docs, etc).
However we start writing, there still comes a time to translate that content into something other people can read on the Web. For many years, we’ve used custom authoring tools built by our in-house developers. And we’ve always felt very grateful to have them — if you’ve ever transcribed a lot of plain text to HTML, you know how painfully slow the writing process can become.
But as we’ve switched back-end systems, we’ve occasionally written content in other authoring tools, then ported it back to our site when the tools were up and running. These have ranged from basic text editors (TextWrangler, Atom, Sublime Text) to desktop publishing apps (Word, PowerPoint) to web-based authoring tools(Penflip, DraftIn, Poetica, Google Docs).
There’s one feature all of these tools lack: a way to easily preview content on the Web, including how it feels across different platforms and devices.
That’s where Microsoft Sway has come in handy.
Still in public preview, Sway is a web-based editor that’s built for web content. And even though it’s built by the Microsoft Office team, it doesn’t feel like an Office product.
Unlike most authoring tools—which use a WYSIWYG model — Sway requires you to work with different content blocks. Regardless of content type (text, images, or video) each block is responsively rendered across devices, so you won’t spend a lot of time deciding how your content looks; Sway does that part for you. And there’s something liberating about giving up that control.
Maybe it’s just an issue of exposure with traditional authoring tools. After at least a decade of using Microsoft Office for term papers, class presentations, and workplace tasks, I bring my own set of baggage whenever I open one of these applications — too many late nights reformatting your headers and footers or adjusting your line spacing can have that effect on a person.
As I started working with these other tools, I realized the same was true of our old authoring system. After writing for a long time in the same system, it’s hard not to fall in to certain patterns and styles.
When you get really comfortable with one tool, you tend to write what you know has worked in the past. And more often than not, you write in the same way. Why not color inside the lines, right?
Enter Sway. After a lot of experimentation, I realized Sway wasn’t well-suited to the type of content we usually produce for our site. I haven’t always had the easiest time explaining the concept of Sway, and I think the Sway team is struggling with that themselves. Is it a webpage? A slicker, web-based PowerPoint presentation? An experiment Microsoft will ditch in six months?
To me, Sways feels like it was built for telling a story. That’s why I wrote this:
One of our goals at GCFLearnFree is to explain the basics of everyday technology in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand. With this article, I decided to introduce the concept of e-readers with some personal details from my own life: how I learned to read, why I own so many books, and how I first learned about e-readers.
OK, so we don’t normally write in the first person or post pictures of our living rooms to the site. But if I wanted to explain e-readers to a friend or family member, I think I’d take a similar approach. And as I’ve mentioned before, I think these kinds of details might be a powerful way to connect with the people who visit GCFLearnFree.org — to let our users know who we are, where we’re coming from, and how we can help.
To be clear, we’re not going to start building an entire new library of content with Sway. But perhaps more than any other tool we’ve encountered in recent months, it’s given us a lot to think about as we rebuild our custom authoring tools and consider the type of content we want to write and share with our learners.
