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Are you interested in knowing all the ways the last two years of Evernote changes have complicated basic workflows?


pkempe

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I'd be happy to help you out by giving you plenty of concrete examples, if you're actually interested. Yeah you've got a gazillion new features and the new landing page in the app with a picture of a cup of coffee and window blinds, but there are lots of basic things that are really just so frustrating now, needlessly so, and I wonder all the time if you even realize how this slows down my workflow and makes me feel Evernote is increasingly unreliable. This really bothers me because I've been using Evernote for a long time—since 2010—and I use it to file everything. So I want it to work and to be able to trust that it will always be stable and reliable and operate as I expect it.

Recently, this has not been the case... but I don't feel like there's any way I can speak up or get anyone's attention. Yelling into a forum and hearing nothing in return, or scrolling through perky help guides? Not my idea of fun.

Anyway, just thought I'd offer. Lmk.

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I'm still an Evernote Legacy user; I haven't seen any impact to my workflows

Since you're posting in the Version 10 forums, I'm guessing you decided to switch to the V10 product   
I seems that was a bad decision for you; why not use the Legacy product?

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@pkempe  While I doubt that anyone at Evernote will see this or hear you, if you want to outline some of your disruptions, happy users of v10 may have some feedback or suggestions on new workflows.  While change is difficult, especially when hoisted upon workflows unexpectedly, humans are really good at adapting and getting used to new workflows over time.  Personally, I find a lot of my "disrupted" workflows are now much better with the additional things I am able to do with v10 (especially around the editor and flow of the notes).

Another alternative as @DTLow will reliably point out... is the Legacy version still works and will allow you to gauge when/if to switch your workflows, or whether to plan for a potential need to move to something else in the future when/if Legacy is phased out.

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10 hours ago, aukirk said:

@pkempe  While I doubt that anyone at Evernote will see this or hear you, if you want to outline some of your disruptions, happy users of v10 may have some feedback or suggestions on new workflows.  While change is difficult, especially when hoisted upon workflows unexpectedly, humans are really good at adapting and getting used to new workflows over time.  Personally, I find a lot of my "disrupted" workflows are now much better with the additional things I am able to do with v10 (especially around the editor and flow of the notes).

Another alternative as @DTLow will reliably point out... is the Legacy version still works and will allow you to gauge when/if to switch your workflows, or whether to plan for a potential need to move to something else in the future when/if Legacy is phased out.

Glad to hear there are satisfied users out there! 

In my opinion, Evernote has never been perfect, at least for my workflow, and I’ve always seen room for improvement (kaizen), so I don’t have much longing for the past. I just want to do stuff, and I want to see less less friction.

Alas! The developers have complicated and broken some workflows. But, they have also made some new things possible, so I think the way forward is to suggest concrete ways that the new apps can be improved. Possibly, as aukirk suggests, options exist within the new apps already to be discovered. Where they don’t if the developers have concrete examples, they might be able to address the issues in the future.

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I have dipped my toe in the V10 Windows desktop waters a few times, on a backup machine.  Each dip has lasted at most an hour.  The incremental clicks. the missing features, and most importantly the painful SLOWNESS continue to keep me from seriously considering V10 desktop as a viable alternative for my use case (GTD, paperless, 2nd brain). 

Not sure I've seen anything beyond pretty that is an improvement in V10.  But then I admit my usage has been limited as it does not work for my base case.  😟

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As always with major changes there is no absolute better or worse. The more elaborate and fine tuned workflows have been, the easier they are interrupted. And just one click more adds up to many clicks if an app is used day in, day out.

So the risk of breaking things is high, and the chances of not influencing users life pretty dim when a change like v10 is made. However we had a longer period of not changing / not adapting before, which breaks an app as well, at least on the long run. So far the philosophical side.

My use of EN is split between the iOS apps, the Mac client and a little Windows plus on occasion the web client.

On iOS I really like the new app better than the one before. It has brought significant improvements, like the editor, nested tag support and tables. There are some hiccups (the integration with other apps used to be better), and the watch app is still missing. It is  s-l-o-w  on older iOS devices (ok, these are pretty end of life, will probably not live beyond iOS 14, but still good to go with most other apps).

To move EN on iOS from good to a real burner, my top feature would be the ability to use it in split mode on the iPad, having 2 EN sessions open side by side, one for retrieval, the other for creation. Plus enable multi-note-operations, like tagging, moving and TOC-ing.

On the Mac I am running Legacy and v10 side by side. Initially it was legacy, and only some testing with v10. Currently I see my use moving more and more to v10, just because I often start something there, and have no reason to switch over. However there are still use cases that are exclusively or still preferably performed in legacy. These are mainly things where the app needs to interact with the rest of the world, like scanning, importing, seamlessly modifying attachments in other apps, printing etc. Here v10 still has a way to go for feature parity for my use cases. But again, my day to day use is already happening in the v10 client, legacy is now my backup app for missing features.

So far as a status review, plainly subjective, seen from my personal use cases and preferences.

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13 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

To move EN on iOS from good to a real burner, my top feature would be the ability to use it in split mode on the iPad, having 2 EN sessions open side by side, one for retrieval, the other for creation. Plus enable multi-note-operations, like tagging, moving and TOC-ing.

For me... all of the efficiency losses in v10 are outweighed by the vast improvement in the editor. Using highlighter colors and combining checklists with check boxes makes it all worth while to me. 
 

My number one disruptions on both iOS and Mac is the inability to open two instances or search windows side by side. As @PinkElephant points out, this works be the “killer” feature of iOS to have multitasking available on the iPad... but equally as disruptive to my workflow is the inability to do that on my Mac, where most of my processing in Evernote is done. 
 

But definitely count me in the happy v10 user camp... I can do so much more with Evernote as a project manager and storage/retrieval system now. 

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Thanks, folks, for your thoughts.

@DTLow & @aukirk, I'm not using Legacy, and only learned of it recently. I am indeed on v.10.11. Legacy isn't going to be a permanent solution, as its support will get dropped sooner or later—it doesn't seem worth it to consider that to be a reliable path forward. Remember, Evernote isn't just some "fun" app that it's nice to have like a game, or a "one of many" app like a browser or email client, but for folks like me, using it for over a decade to file and track all sorts of notes and documents and saved web articles for both personal and work use and my entire paperless records system—it is, as @CalS described it, my "2nd brain".

As @PinkElephant says, the more elaborate workflows are, the more likely they are to be disrupted. I'm really not whining about needing to rearrange the way I do this or that; I understand how software needs to evolve and move forward, and I understand there will always be a tension between long-time users who've gotten used to "the way things used to be" and keeping it fresh and adapting to the present tech world and welcoming for new users who don't have any of the old-timers' concerns.

As you point out @PinkElephant, a real hiccup now is "where the app needs to interact with the rest of the world, like scanning, importing, seamlessly modifying attachments in other apps, printing, etc." I mean, come on, is this not at the heart of what EN is??? And yes, these are a big part of my issues—EN has always been a great place to store captured web pages, so I can reliably save info without needing to bookmark a whole website and then find it lost in three years when the page is either gone or it's been assigned a new URL so...it's also essentially gone. I'm a high school teacher and EN has been GREAT for storing articles to use in class, and over the years I've found great ways to use EN's various page capture options to store decent-looking versions of pages. But now... sheesh. I understand some of this is due to the way web code has gotten more complex and it's not as easy for EN to strip it down to the text in a pretty way, but their job is to figure out how to make it work.

And importing into EN—oh my gosh. (All these examples are from the v.10 MacOS client.) EN now appears in some services menus (my print dialogues still offer "save to EN") but not in share menus (e.g. Preview). So in some cases I need to "open in Preview" and then use Preview's print dialogue to get the "save to EN" option, since the Share menu in Preview doesn't include EN anymore. And when I *do* print to EN, it takes forever to show up, and doesn't seem to do anything consistently (sometimes the newly shared doc opens in a window on top of EN, sometimes I have to find my default notebook, etc.

And THEN once I've imported it, the most basic processing actions are SENSELESSLY difficult:

  • clicking on the name of the notebook—which is intuitive— no longer lets you select other notebooks to move the note to from a dropdown. Instead, it opens that entire notebook
  • Instead, when I want to move my newly-imported note to its proper notebook—which is an obvious thing a user would do while interacting with a new note in the note's window—I need to first hover over the notebook name, which only then makes visible the icon for "add to other notebook."  Below are the two views of this at the top of the note view. The first is what you see. The second is what you see if you hover over the notebook name for a second.
  •  image.png.bca59484344b7e2228c8f2ada641e134.pngimage.png.c205967e1c553c796f1b63cd9e1f5f8b.png
  • And this is what really gets me: when initially processing a new note, you want to put it in the right notebook and assign some quick tags. But no longer are the tab options right next to the notebook name—which would be intuitive, since these are all metadata "finding aids" and should appear together in one place. Instead, I need to go down to the *bottom* of the note view to add tags.
  • And since the "add tag" icon is tiny, it takes additional effort to select it after traveling all the way from the top of the note. (This is Fitts' Law, covered in entry-level UX design courses.)

I mean, I can go on. When typing in the name of a notebook to ADD a note too, the top autocomplete option is no longer selected by default. Formerly, I could just type "lib" and hit enter, since "library" would be the top autocomplete hit and would be selected by default. Now I actually need to arrow or mouse down to the top choice, EVEN IF IT'S THE ONLY CHOICE POSSIBLE!!

++++++++++++++++++=

So, yeah, many of these things by themselves might be nit-picky, and you might say no big deal get over it, but they do, taken together, add up to significant slow-downs to a basic workflow. And note that these are not byzantine workflows peculiar to the way *I* do things—processing a new note seems like a pretty basic process at the heart of EN's functionality.

Also, though, and maybe the bigger issue, is that the fact that basic slowdowns like these popped into EN updates makes me concerned with the product going forward. Is EN a reliable platform? Does it really deserve the amount of trust I put into it? If they seemingly don't care about changes that so obviously and foreseeably impact users' workflows, what else might pop up in the future?

Again, I don't really know why I'm typing all this. I don't expect them to respond; I feel pretty powerless, which isn't a great place to be when I have this much invested in the platform.

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2 minutes ago, aukirk said:

But definitely count me in the happy v10 user camp... I can do so much more with Evernote as a project manager and storage/retrieval system now. 

Yeah, and I think this is part of the problem: EN is trying to be an Everything app. Remember Work chat? Good lord. It kept begging me, "do this thing, do this thing," and I'm like, "Shut up, I don't want to chat with colleagues in the evernote app, I just want to store notes in a reliable way that lets me retrieve them easily."

Maybe I should give their editor another chance though—I've gotten away from using EN as a place to create basic content.

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@John in Michigan USA Yeah well I'm only telling you if you are an Evernote product manager and you also are going to pay me to do your UX/HCD work for you.

Ironically, I just now (15 minutes ago) sent in a response to their "give feedback" link from the evernote app menu bar that involved multiple f-bombs. I mean, why does the PDF annotation editor not let me rotate a PDF? Why is that option grayed out? And why do you have to open the annotation editor to rotate a PDF... why wouldn't this be a top-level tooltip (right click) option for a PDF in a note, as it seems like a very basic quick thing somebody might want to do with multiple notes??

So there. You got one evidence of suckage for free.

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51 minutes ago, pkempe said:

Yeah well I'm only telling you if you are an Evernote product manager

You're posting in a user discussion forum

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