I was tipped off to Writely a few weeks ago by a fellow geek. I recently visited Writely again yesterday and found they’ve entered public beta and I gave it a try.
What Is It?
Writely is essentially on online word processor. As far as document editing, all your basics are there. Create a new document and you can edit it with a variety of formatting options. Colors, fonts, bullet lists and like are all represented. Writely also allows both live collaborating and document versioning.
Here’s a few of the highlights I noticed while using Writely:
- Upload documents in native Word format.
- Inviting a user to collaborate with Writely is very easy.
- Editing is done very well. Even ‘copy and paste’ work intuitively
- Spell check works very well. It acts much like spell check in any other desktop word processor
Design
Visually Writely holds it’s own. It takes the typical “I’m friendly” approach to it’s style utilizing large, round, bubbly type often found with applications attempting to convey ‘ease of use’. It’s seems somewhat inconsistant however in that some elements are soft and rounded while others are squarish or boxy. The homepage contains a mix of dashed and solid lines despite being used in the same way. You can also note the distinct lack of grid use as is common in online design. Despite the lack of design refinement, it gets the message across: Writely will be a simple, easy-to-use tool.
Interaction Design
When I use a tool for the first time, the first question I ask myself is to see if I can actually do something with the tool within the first few minutes. Like most first-time users, I really don’t read anything beyond large titles. Once I see something clickable that might move me forward, click and off I go. Writely performed fairly well for me. I was able to register, login, upload a word document and start editing with little trouble. Rarely did I feel I wasn’t moving forward and never really got stuck trying to figure anything out. Overall I would call it a well done ‘first time’ experience.
One area I did find sticky was the initial dashboard you see as a new visitor. Your dashboard contains a series of tabs called ‘Active Documents’, ‘Starred Documents’, ‘Tagged Documents’, and ‘All Documents’. Through assumption I guessed that this was an organization scheme once I had documents available, but I had no idea what starred documents were, and how they differed from tagged documents. I felt Writely certainly could have used some better text for first time visitors to orient them to the application.
Another issue with Writely is the excessive use of pop-ups whenever you edit a document. They have already mentioned this as an issue they have received feedback on. I found it very confusing as my Firefox installation opens pop-ups in another tab, and I quickly found a number of Writely tabs cluttering my browser.
A Few Goodies
Writely had a few goodies I thought worth sharing from an Interaction Design perspective. First when you select a document for an action, it highlights the entire row. It’s a subtle effect yet very helpful.
When I tried to share a document for the first time, Writely had some nice visual instructions that let me learn about how it works during the process. The screenshots were nice in that, as I stated above, there’s no way I would have read very much at that point, but seeing an example caught my eye and kept me moving.
Wrap Up
All in all I liked Writely. The trick, as with all these online tools, is not finding them useful but seeing the need for them in my life. While I could see myself using Writely, what I don’t see is other, less technical people, jumping on board to collaborate on a document with me. At least not yet. After all, no one wants to learn a new tool to do essentially what they can do before unless they really need it. However what is interesting about Writely, is it is a great attempt at an online version of man’s oldest application, word processing. Getting this right, and adopted as a daily habit by casual users, signifies a major shift that many have been salivating for. It’s the death of the individual PC desktop and the adoption of software as an online service, even complicated pieces such as a word processor. Online Photoshop anyone?
PS
I used Writely to spell check this post! 
Published on October 5, 2005
Resides in User Experience, Web Technologies
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One Response to “Writely Public Beta”
1
cory on October 13th, 2005
I tested out this little app after reading your feature. I agree it’s very clean and easy-to-use. I was most impressed they let me post an entry directly to my Wordpress blog. I could see myself using it for this purpose because it’s annoying typing (and editing) inside the little white box they give you. Thanks for the tip!