(Archived) An open letter to the kind folks of Evernote

[kkingmd 0]

@Evernote, (in the spirit of your podcasts)

I've been a faithful EN user now for nearly two years. I have listened to every podcast (thanks for figuring out how to keep Phil's voice volume constant!) and have watched the growth of your services with great excitement. However, I must ask you to help us, the users, with some issues.

There have been a variety of issues brought up in this forum regarding some pretty significant usability issues with EN as well as missing and needed features. While I know we Mac users are a self-entitled bunch (right Dave?) I suspect the same issues keep cropping up over on the PC forums as well. For over a year, we've heard, "planned for the future" but I haven't seen a whole lot of movement or heard anything more concrete than that. I have seen some calls for a roadmap and while I realize that you may not want to publish such a scheme, some concrete news or disclosure of plans may be a good idea. I am afraid that Evernote may miss transitioning from satisfying those early adopters (such as myself) who are willing to deal with those usability issues for a finite period of time to satisfying a larger portion of your market. I believe you are approaching a tipping point and may not be able to satisfy your growing customer base.

My impression is that you have focused on gaining capital, and expanding into certain devices that you feel can help your market share (these opinions are based solely on your podcasts.) However, I would ask you: "when are you going to focus not on expanding, but rather on transitioning your software from 'okay' to 'insanely great?'" You have an insanely great concept, but the execution is lagging in my opinion.

A few issues for illustration:

1. Export of items from EN. This issue is huge. There is NO WAY to easily get your stuff back out of Evernote. No drag and drop of items out of your notes, no batch export of multiple notes. Argh!

2. Any sort of hierarchal organization of anything. I have embraced a "flat" notebook structure and instead allowed tags to help keep me organized. However, with well over 100 tags and absolutely no way to organize them, they are rapidly becoming unwieldy. I would love to be able to organize tags in a hierarchal fashion, be able to capitalize tags even if the first one in alphabetical order is not capitalized (I've reported that bug at least twice), I would love to be able to have certain tag lists for certain notebooks (allows me not to flood my "personal notebook" tags with choices from my 10 other notebooks. I would love to be able to EASILY search by tags or select tags to restrict my search criteria (scrolling through a list of 100+ tags makes this rather difficult. I understand the issues with hierarchal notebooks and the limits on the number of notebooks, but many users find this sort of organization scheme intuitive (especially your "majority" adopters) and if you want mass market acceptance, I think you are going to have to allow this. Yohimbo allows it, NoteBook allows it (?), other programs allow it. Please, the organization is getting unwieldy for some of us.

3. Email. Come on guys, just about every software program I use uses Mail.app for the email client. Why can't you?

4. Save location of files. Again, just about every software program I use allows the user to define a save location. This is critical for two reasons. 1. As my collection of notes grows, I'm gonna run out of HDD space eventually and perhaps I want it on an external device. 2. I'd really like to encrypt my EN files by having it sit in my Documents folder so I can encrypt the whole Documents folder.

5. Shared notebooks. How cool is that? However, I can only get it via the web clients??? For over six months??? Not cool. Don''t deploy features if you aren't ready to support it across your platforms as well. See also: note history.

These are a few of the more memorable issues that I can come up with. I absolutely love Evernote. I believe in it. However, as I find more and more ways to use it, I find it increasingly unwieldy and the omissions and issues become more remarkable.

Can you, Evernote, please shed some light on your plans for the platform as a whole? Please, I firmly believe you must focus on improving the quality of your product, the user experience and your software.

Thank you for all your work. I hope to be an Evernote user for a very long time.

Kevin

[DavidR 5]

The quality of this thread (including the original post, the replies by Dave Engberg, and comments by others) is a PERFECT example of why I love Evernote and believe in it enough to have put substantial portions of my life into it.

Thank you Evernote and Evernote users for the thoughtful, cordial, respectful, and productive conversation.

Let's keep making Evernote a better and better service.

(And, +1 for in-app notebook sharing. As soon as it's there, my wife goes Premium!)

_david

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

or maybe a rambling folk song from the early '70s.

I think it was the Traveling Wilburys (kind of the same thing), featuring Dylan on vocals.

[engberg 89]

"Zippo and the Geech" sounds like an old comic strip, or maybe a rambling folk song from the early '70s.

[kkingmd 0]

Actually, those are the Mac engineers. Brandon's gone by many nicknames in the past ... Zippo and Grandma were the two most common. Take your pick!

My vote is for Zippo and Geech, Mac engineers extraordinaire.

Kevin

[hodnettd 0]

I ran into an inconsistency with the way Evernote supports the Helvetica font, which is why I was so interested in this open letter. I suspect Evernote (the company) has three conflicting requirements:

1) They'd like to make all of their features universal. If you can perform an action on the iPad, you can likewise perform that action on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, in a web browser, on Macintoshes, Windows based machines, Android devices, Blackberries, and whatever other platforms they choose to support.

2) They want to leverage the strengths of each platform, such as touch controls (tap controls) on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, services on the Macs, hyperlinks on the web, etc. "Paste without formatting" is an example, as well as font support.

3) They want to minimize the amount of platform specific code they have to write and maintain. Ideally, the search algorithm should not have to be tweaked for each platform and exhaustively tested for each platform; it should just work no matter which platform it was ported to.

As the famous adage goes, "Better, Faster, Cheaper. Pick any two."

Evernote (the company) is probably already doing this to some extent but maybe they need to start a blog style discussion, be more clear about their long term strategic objectives and solicit some feedback from the users. For example...

After thinking about this, I'd much rather see Evernote focus on goal #2 and #3, in that order, to the exclusion of #1. 99% of the time that I use Evernote, I do so on my MacBook Pro and occasionally on my iPhone. Being able to use and display the Helvetica font consistently within every OS X application, including Evernote, is far more valuable to me than being able to view my notes on someone else's Windows based machine or within a web browser.

I do freely admit though that there are probably Evernote customers that regularly switch between Macs and Windows, or frequently check their notes from public terminals and thus prize the web interface. They would probably prefer #1 and #3 to the exclusion of #2. I don't work for Evernote however so I don't know what the usage ratio actually is.

In any case, with respect to the original open letter, I agree that Evernote is a fantastic product. I do worry that the clients for each platform are becoming unfocused and perhaps the hardworking engineers are getting stretched a little thinly. There definitely is a tendency for them to skip "the small stuff" and I fear that small stuff will snowball.

Long story short (too late), my vote is for the company to stop trying so hard to please everyone everywhere, and instead start working on "the small stuff" that would convince existing Mac users to become premium members, or Windows users to become premium Windows users. It's actually ok for a product to be really good on Macs and lousy on Windows machines (or vice versa) as long as they eventually catch up. iTunes and Safari for example, are fantastic on OS X but absolutely ***** on Windows. That doesn't seem to have hurt Apple any though.

[engberg 89]

Actually, those are the Mac engineers. Brandon's gone by many nicknames in the past ... Zippo and Grandma were the two most common. Take your pick!

[kkingmd 0]

The full time Mac team recently doubled (from Geech to Geech + Brandon).

I nominate EN for the best-named support dude ever. Geech? Friggin awesome. Now, we have to work on Brandon's name...

-- KK

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Apologies if I have managed to post this twice.

I would be grateful for instructions on how to hide tags - I can't figure it out. I am giving a presentation on tools for personal knowledge management in a couple days, and i would really like to show people an Evernote notebook. However, I really don't want them to see all the tags I use in my personal notebooks. Thanks.

As Dave mentioned, this is only on the Windows version. If you have the latest version (3.5.4.2343), you right click on the tag bar (far left) & select "hide unassigned tags."

[melitabel 4]

Apologies if I have managed to post this twice.

I would be grateful for instructions on how to hide tags - I can't figure it out. I am giving a presentation on tools for personal knowledge management in a couple days, and i would really like to show people an Evernote notebook. However, I really don't want them to see all the tags I use in my personal notebooks. Thanks.

[crispinb 8]

Re: exporting a PDF

On Windows, we recently added a feature that lets you hide tags that aren't found on any of the notes in the current view. If this is enabled, and you click on a notebook, you'll only see the tags that have been applied to at least one of the notes in that notebook. We're testing this in the Windows betas, and we really like how it feels, so we plan to roll it into the Mac UI at some point in the future.

Yes please! This would be a very welcome change.

[engberg 89]

Yes, we periodically go through a "hold all features, let's fix some bugs!" phase. But, as you imagine, there's a lot of demand for new features both externally and internally. We're also recruiting to hopefully allow us to do more of both. The full time Mac team recently doubled (from Geech to Geech + Brandon).

We did do a pretty significant usability evaluation process recently, focused on the initial hour and week of use. We found some huge glaring problems, and have a lot of things scheduled to help improve general usability of the software. Usability is, however, a journey and not a destination...

[kkingmd 0]

Thanks for the feedback. We've made a conscious decision (for better or worse) that we'd rather get new features out on one platform first if possible rather than holding back features until they are fully implemented and consistent across every platform. I realize that this inconsistency can be confusing and frustrating, but the alternative would be worse.

Dave,

That is very interesting. I didn't realize that about the Mac and Win platforms. I'm not a programmer (the last time I wrote a program was in Pascal in college -- dissuaded me from going into CS) so I don't know these issues. But I am a passionate end-user who is kinda picky about UI.

In the end, I guess what I would like to see from Evernote is a "Snow Leopard" type of effort. Hold on the cool, totally new stuff and get the house in order. Get to all that stuff that is supposed to happen "in the future", fix some real usability issues (tag organization) and consolidate your position. I absolutely love this product and I want to keep giving you my money. (By the way, I'd pay _more_ than $50 per year)

Keep up the terrific work.

Kevin

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback. We've made a conscious decision (for better or worse) that we'd rather get new features out on one platform first if possible rather than holding back features until they are fully implemented and consistent across every platform. I realize that this inconsistency can be confusing and frustrating, but the alternative would be worse.

For example, on the Mac, if you search for text that matches a PDF, you'll see the text highlighted in the PDF, and you can copy and paste from the PDF directly from Evernote.

Windows doesn't include built-in PDF support (like Mac does), so we're using a more limited "PDF preview" on Windows that displays a page-by-page bitmap rendering of the PDF. We don't yet support highlighting of searches within PDFs on Windows, and we don't support copying and pasting from PDFs unless you open them in an external viewer.

Given the ease of implementing full PDF features on the Mac, and the difficulty of doing so on Windows, we had to choose between withholding this capability from the Mac, or else releasing it on the Mac with lower, inconsistent behavior on Windows until we can find a suitable solution to upgrade the Windows experience.

As a Mac user, I'd prefer the current solution, but we obviously realize that the net result of these decisions is that there will be inconsistencies as you move between platforms.

Thanks

[sergiomiranda 0]

On Windows, we recently added a feature that lets you hide tags that aren't found on any of the notes in the current view. If this is enabled, and you click on a notebook, you'll only see the tags that have been applied to at least one of the notes in that notebook. We're testing this in the Windows betas, and we really like how it feels, so we plan to roll it into the Mac UI at some point in the future.

Thanks

I have suggested this several times and I think it will make browsing tags much, much easier. Restricting the tags that are shown to the ones present in the current notebook is a much needed feature to those who have a large number of tags. I hope it comes to the Mac version soon.

The one thing I belive you should focus next, that Kevin mentioned, is on leverging your features across all platforms.

I still can't understand how I have to go in to the web interface to share a notebook because my Mac desktop doesn't allow it.

And how about ink on Mac?

[jefito 5,598]

All very good points Jeff - agree on all of them. You said it better than I did.

BTW, I'm not saying that the good Evernotables ought not to strive for intuitive or as-easy-as-possible, it's just that there's frequently a tension between power user features and ease-of-use. As we all probably know, adding features often wins.

~Jeff

[NightStalker 407]

All very good points Jeff - agree on all of them. You said it better than I did.

[jefito 5,598]

However, the points you have raised are all very valid points, and seem reminiscent of a lot of software where the manual is written by the programmers.

Or when the manual writers are chasing the software. Writing manuals is hard enough when you're not trying to keep up with a moving target.

The insiders know how to do all this stuff, but there is a gap between that insider knowledge and the poor mug punters out here in user-land who are relying on intuition and the experience associated with the particular platform. You get used to the way that Macs or PCs do things in particular ways - like the drag and drop export on a Mac, for example.

Intuition only takes a user so far. You would never in a million years intuit that Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V is a Cut, Copy operation (or the Mac equivalent) -- you have to learn it. Having learned certain basics, it's not unreasonable to expect that they will work in applications, and that's all fine, but applications, being by their nature specialized, nearly always have operations that do not flow from native platform usage. What part of the Mac, Windows or Linux user story gives you experience with tags, for example? Making this intuitive is impossible by definition, so the fallback is often to aim to be "easily discoverable", but even that can be difficult for UI designers. Ultimately a user needs to rely on experimentation, other users, or good documentation (and be willing to use it) to learn how to do more advanced operations.

I agree entirely with your premise that EN seems to be trying to grow the product and the user base, but it is actually at a stage where some good consolidation and debugging, UI improvements, and general improvement should be the main priority - not new features. Especially ones that don't work properly....

I agree with this, for the most part. I don't mind the asymptotic march towards Pure List Handling Nirvana (for example), because I can see the progress and understand that it's complicated and shaking out all of the corner cases is very difficult.

Evernote really, REALLY needs to concentrate on making the program as solid, reliable, bug-free, and intuitive as it can possibly be. If they want more people to use it, it has to be made as EASY as possible for new users to get the hang of it. And cross-platform mirroring would be an ideal outcome too - things should work exactly the same way on a Mac or on a PC. That would be the holy grail, IMHO.

Again, words like "intuitive" and "EASY" are, well, easy to say, but making available complex operations (with all of their options) intuitive is very difficult, if not impossible. Solid, reliable and bug-free are the most important of your criteria, to my mind.

~Jeff

[engberg 89]

Re: exporting a PDF

If you have a single note with a PDF, then you can right-click on the PDF to Save As... to the desktop.

If you had a batch of notes that you wanted to export, you can select them and then use the File>Export menu option and change the export format to "HTML." Then, you'll see that you get one directory per note, with the HTML content and any attachments in that directory. Use the Finder to search within the top-level directory to find particular files (e.g. to find all of the PDF files that you exported).

Re: tags

We considered designing Evernote so that tags were contained "within" a notebook, but this would mean that you couldn't really do operations on tags across notebooks. I.e. if there are "French" tags in both my "cooking" and "baking" notebooks, then those would be different tags, and I wouldn't be able to do any batch operations when "All Notebooks" is selected. When you walk through all of the implications, it makes more sense to have tags be global labels that can be applied to any note rather than trying to have a separate batch of tags within each notebook.

On Windows, we recently added a feature that lets you hide tags that aren't found on any of the notes in the current view. If this is enabled, and you click on a notebook, you'll only see the tags that have been applied to at least one of the notes in that notebook. We're testing this in the Windows betas, and we really like how it feels, so we plan to roll it into the Mac UI at some point in the future.

Thanks

[NightStalker 407]

Excellent work, Kevin - I 'third' the motion.

I use EN on both Macs and PCs, and love it to bits. I have several colleagues, family, and friends, all using EN, most having gone Premium. (Commissions, Dave?? )

However, the points you have raised are all very valid points, and seem reminiscent of a lot of software where the manual is written by the programmers. The insiders know how to do all this stuff, but there is a gap between that insider knowledge and the poor mug punters out here in user-land who are relying on intuition and the experience associated with the particular platform. You get used to the way that Macs or PCs do things in particular ways - like the drag and drop export on a Mac, for example.

I agree entirely with your premise that EN seems to be trying to grow the product and the user base, but it is actually at a stage where some good consolidation and debugging, UI improvements, and general improvement should be the main priority - not new features. Especially ones that don't work properly....

Evernote really, REALLY needs to concentrate on making the program as solid, reliable, bug-free, and intuitive as it can possibly be. If they want more people to use it, it has to be made as EASY as possible for new users to get the hang of it. And cross-platform mirroring would be an ideal outcome too - things should work exactly the same way on a Mac or on a PC. That would be the holy grail, IMHO.

Go Kevin - and Go Evernote team

[kkingmd 0]

Thanks for the feedback, kkingmd.

A few comments off the top of my head:

1. You can select notes and Export them into either a perfectly lossless Evernote XML format, or into the most portable and low-loss format that we could possibly think of (HTML). Any other export format would be a worse fit for Evernote notes. For example, if you have several notes with audio, and others that are web clips, then exporting to something like PDF would lose all of your audio.

Drag and drop also works for everything except for HTML, which is just an unimplemented feature that's already in our bug database.

2. You can drag tags under other tags to make a hierarchy.

Thanks

Dave,

Thanks for the reply. One of the reasons I believe in your product is that the "big guns" in your company such as you and Phil interact so readily and easily with we the users. Thanks for that.

Maybe I'm just a big dummy, but I tried to export a PDF note from Evernote as an XML but was not able to figure out how to open it without going back to Evernote. I tried Pages, Preview, Safari and none would recognize it as a file they could read. Please guide me away from my ignorance. Really, if I were to extend a common Mac UI feature, I should be able to drag a note onto my desktop and have EN export the file. It could even pop up a dialog asking me how I wanted to export it (PDF, XML, HTML, etc...)

I guess I was aware that you could nest tags. However, this seems to be a very inelegant solution. It would be absolutely cool to be able to restrict or define tags to certain notebooks. I would love to have folders to organize them in (mostly to aid in searching, not necessarily when tagging a note which I do mostly from memory anyway.) While we're at it, how about a way to prevent me from accidentally creating a new tag when I accidentally type "medicla" rather than "medical"? I sometimes commit a typo but don't catch it until I hit the comma and volia, I've created a new tag that I now have to go hunt down and delete. It would be nice to be able to lock a notebook into certain tags and/or lock myself from creating new tags by accident.

I really don't have much experience with software that permits tagging and requires it to the same degree as EN. I am noticing, however, with my "flat, tagged" hierarchy in Evernote, my search results are getting much less specific. One of the problems with OCRing all the PDFs is that over time I am getting more and more results from searches that used to result in fewer. For example, back when I had a couple hundred notes, the search "texas DPS registration" would result in about six or so notes. Now, I get over 30. I'd love to use the tags to help limit my search criteria, but don't know how to. I seem to remember having to use some kind of weird syntax in the search field.

In the end, I think the software needs to be much more powerful, focus on usability, especially on the organization, search and export. You know who your vocal users are, perhaps time to get a group together and focus on making your product the best place to keep all our stuff.

Kevin

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback, kkingmd.

A few comments off the top of my head:

1. You can select notes and Export them into either a perfectly lossless Evernote XML format, or into the most portable and low-loss format that we could possibly think of (HTML). Any other export format would be a worse fit for Evernote notes. For example, if you have several notes with audio, and others that are web clips, then exporting to something like PDF would lose all of your audio.

Drag and drop also works for everything except for HTML, which is just an unimplemented feature that's already in our bug database.

2. You can drag tags under other tags to make a hierarchy.

Thanks

[Lougoose 0]

I am very impressed.

Great issues, very well written.

I second the motion.