Fredrik Danielsson, principal product manager of TinyMCE, an enterprise-grade WYSIWYG rich text editing component.
Fredrik is an ardent software and web app designer turned product manager, who revels in the detail. With 20+ years’ experience working across web design, UX/UI, design, marketing and software development, he specializes in web apps and services that serve the precise needs of the enterprise sector. Over the past 5+ years, Fredrik has shifted from being the product designer to product manager of TinyMCE as it’s iterated through versions 3 to 6. He’s played a crucial role in helping to bring the codebase of TinyMCE into the modern world and focusing on creating scalable components that can affect notable improvements in users productivity, content creation workflows and efficiencies.
In his current role as the principal product manager of TinyMCE, he makes sense of how other designers, developers and engineers utilize and customize TinyMCE within their own software projects. He’s constantly exploring ways to bring the user experience into the core of the editor and collaborating with the engineering team on novel ways to implement complex features in a simple form.
Can you explain what WYSIWYG is and the benefits it offers?
The term as we refer to it dates back to the beginning of the web, when the way to publish content online was to write HTML. I remember there were classes for people to learn how to “author” HTML, but to no-one’s surprise, the idea of teaching everyone to write HTML to publish content online didn’t fly. As word processors before the internet had shown, users much prefer to see what the document looks like as they create it, so the concept of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get, or the WYSIWYG approach to writing HTML became the norm for how non-developers write their blog posts, essays, news articles, poetry, chat messages and everything between.
Can you share the journey of TinyMCE from versions 3 to 6 and the challenges faced during these iterations?
The first version of TinyMCE was released in 2004, so 20 years ago! The main challenge has been keeping up with the ever-evolving tech landscape. The web development community loves new and fresh, so making sure TinyMCE works well with the development and design trends is important to us.
How do you balance the demands of modern web design and user expectations with the technical limitations when updating TinyMCE?
As we prioritize our customers, we work hard to implement the latest trends, meeting modern expectations. If a feature is needed, the team builds it. Our limitations typically revolve around bandwidth availability rather than technical obstacles. If anything, the biggest challenge is keeping up with the ever-evolving needs of our customers as new technological advancements continue to pop up.
As TinyMCE serves a wide range of enterprises, how do you ensure it meets the diverse needs and scales of different businesses?
Most of our customers face the same functional problem regardless of their industry. At Tiny Technologies, we attack problems from a functional standpoint, so whether you’re a student writing a school essay or a scientist documenting research findings, the right rich text editor is crucial. Where TinyMCE excels is its wide array of features and configuration options, empowering developers to quickly and efficiently address their problems and accelerate the launch of their web applications or SaaS solutions.
How does TinyMCE leverage AI or machine learning technologies to enhance user productivity and content creation workflows?
From my perspective, AI is quite vertical, solving well defined problems quite well. So with our wide array of customer needs, our goal is to leverage the popular tools from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and others to enable developers to create and integrate their ideas into the TinyMCE content creation workflow.
With your extensive background in web design and software development, how do you see the role of WYSIWYG editors evolving in the next few years?
AI will change how we create, edit and review content. Maybe not at the fundamental level, but previously mundane and time consuming tasks can be automated in a fashion that was once unimaginable. For example, a 500-word essay can be quickly generated, improving reviews and suggestions significantly, with humans making the final touch-ups.
What advice would you give to developers and product managers looking to create or improve their web-based content editing tools?
Be both picky and flexible. Think about the content creation workflow and explore how TinyMCE can integrate into it. Much of the really great user experience lies in the configuration details. TinyMCE is not only a ready-made component, with all its options; it’s really a content creation framework and it pays to dive deeper into how it works. But as you learn what you can do, also be open to adjust some requirements and expectations to really take advantage of the capabilities.
With generative AI transforming the world, how will this type of AI be applied to future versions of TinyMCE?
There are really two aspects of generative AI and TinyMCE: content creation, where both creativity and efficiency can be greatly improved, and the human interface of the generated content, which is the important role TinyMCE plays. In some workflows, TinyMCE might not play a part in the content creation process because it happens elsewhere, but for that human review, to tweak the content, TinyMCE is also the go-to tool.
Thank you for the interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit TinyMCE.
