New feature: Meet the new timeline editor

The timeline editor has a brand new look. The small grey box with its rows of tabs is gone, replaced by a clean white panel on the right of your timeline, with plain words, bigger buttons and everything you need one click away.

Tiki-Toki is used by everyone from 13-year-old pupils to people writing up their family history, so we set ourselves one goal: make it obvious what to do next, without hiding the timeline you're building. Your timeline stays in view while you work, and every change shows on it as you type.

A fresh design

Down the left edge of the new panel is a side bar with a clearly labelled button for each part of the editor:

• Stories: add, find, change and delete stories.

• Details: your timeline's title, dates and introduction.

• Look: layout, colours, background, spacing and the 3D view.

• Categories and Periods: group stories by colour and mark out stretches of time. Periods are what we used to call spans.

• Share: your timeline's link, group edit, embedding, printing and exports, all in one place.

• Settings: everything else, such as language, fonts and privacy.

Need more room? Press Hide and the editor tucks away to the side bar so you can see the whole timeline. On smaller laptop screens the panel switches to a more compact size, and on a phone it takes the full width.

Easier from the first story

• Adding a story takes seconds. Press Add a story, give it a title and a date, and press Add to timeline. It appears straight away. Pictures, video, a category, tags and longer text can follow whenever you like.

• One page per story. No more hopping between Basic info, Media, Tags and Extra info tabs. Everything about a story is on one scrolling page, with previous and next buttons to move along the timeline.

• Dates the way you think of them. Separate Day, Month, Year and AD/BC boxes, and only the year is needed. You can also type or paste a whole date such as 14 Oct 1066, or pick one from a calendar.

• Find stories quickly. Search by name or year, and the story list is grouped by century, or by month or day on shorter timelines.

• Categories as coloured chips. Pick a story's category with one click instead of a dropdown.

• Colours made simple. A swatch opens a colour picker with suggested colours and the ones already in your timeline, and the editor tells you if story text would be hard to read on your background colour.

• Pictures you can position. Drag a picture to frame it, or use the "Keep in view" buttons to make sure nobody's head gets cropped off.

• Save when you're ready. Changes preview on the timeline as you make them, but nothing is kept until you press Save. Undo puts back what you last saved, and the editor checks before you leave anything unsaved.

Prefer what you know? The old editor is still there. Choose your name at the bottom of the side bar, then Use the old editor. Both editors work on the same timelines, so you can switch back and forth.

Built for everyone

The new editor was designed from the start to work for people who use a keyboard or a screen reader, and for anyone who needs to zoom in. Every part of it works from the keyboard. The story list, colour picker and picture positioning all respond to the arrow keys, and the panel still works at 400% zoom. Automated accessibility checks come back clean on every screen. Screen reader testing with NVDA and VoiceOver is still to come. You can read more about our wider accessibility work in Making Tiki-Toki easier for everyone to use.

Help when you need it

Instead of pop-up help boxes, short hints now sit right under the fields they describe. For everything else, the Help button opens our updated FAQs, which now have a whole section on using the new editor. It covers adding your first story, entering dates, pictures and video, categories and periods, sharing and embedding.

Used to the old editor? The FAQ I'm used to the old editor. Where has everything gone? shows where each of the old tabs now lives.

Tell us what you think

Open one of your timelines and give the new editor a try. We'd love to hear how you get on, what you like and what could be better. Please email hello@tiki-toki.com. Your feedback will shape what we do next.