Web Development
BrightSky is a fairly complex site so keeping the user interface simple was paramount. One thing that we experimented with was inline content editing. The plan was to have a toggleable edit button which would allow put the page into an editable state and allow people to edit the text content without being taken to a different page. This would make it obvious what the user was editing rather than filling in an abstract regular form.
However, we found some problems with this. First was accessibility. While it was possible to make this work in an accessible way, and to make it work across platforms (including, for example, mobile where user's can't hover over content or get feedback from mouse cursors) the workarounds to do so completely counteracted the simplistic nature of the interface and the result was something that was more complex than a regular form and which users were unfamiliar with and therefore found confusing or intimidating.
The second was that not everything was text. While making text editable could have worked, there is plenty of data that needs to be filled in in other ways. There are file uploads, checkboxes and drop-down menus. There were also some more advanced text inputs, such as URLs that need extra validation or feedback to the user.
In the end we kept the idea of the "edit" toggle switch but when editing is enabled, we show the user regular form inputs arranged in a way that matches the layout of the page they are editing. This is a nice middle-ground as we get all of the benefits from tried and tested HTML forms as well as the clean user journey that we had planned before. It's not quite as clean as our original dream interface but we're really happy with how it turned out.