Google Keep-style note overview

[Tudeledoki 1]

Google Keep has only 1 feature advantage to Evernote. It's this, multi-column, masoned note overview:

It can be filtered for tags or other search queries. It is very, very powerful.

It is the best note overview for users that want to find a note and for notes that need to find the user. This is a bold statement, but it is easy to support it with logic. Its design should be read as a machine that is optimised for letting a user search their notes:

1. Searching through notes is part computer, part human effort
   1. The computer does all it can by applying your filters and search queries, and by sorting latest-first
   2. The brain+eyes can do all they can with the results of the computer search because
      1. The amount of note content that fits on the screen is maximised. When goal is speed of information transfer scrolling is silver, fitting on screen is gold. Especially when user likes to random-access rather than linearly scan.
         1. Maximum number of columns, adapting to screen width
         2. Variable, not-more-than-necessary height of notes.
      2. (Cutting off long notes to be able to show more notes) vs (showing mostly entire notes, but less of them) is balanced
         1. Note how much time is saved by not requiring the user to "open" individual notes if they are small enough. At least not for reading it. It saves up to 2n clicks for a page with n results.
      3. Notes with very little text get their text enlarged. This is because no assumption can be made that the relative importance of notes correlates linearly with their content length. If no enlargement was done, short, single-sentence notes would be "discriminated" by being harder to find, because their tile on the page would be extremely small.
      4. Coloured notes. They allow the brain to find notes even more quickly. Colors are visually optimal for this: on a table with otherwise blue marbles I can immediately pick out any red marbles. Google lets you color individual notes. Instead, Evernote could just dynamically assign colors to tags when it shows search results! Or you could set some tags to always show a certain color.

I would really, really love this to come to all devices. Again, it is the best notes view I have ever seen in any notes app. Google has not even updated Google Keep in the last (what feels like) 7 years and still people use it, for what must be this feature, because it has almost no other features.

[PinkElephant 9,019]

Personally I find it to be cluttered and visually aggressive. But this is about design, ask 3 people and you end up with 5 opinions.

[Tudeledoki 1]

Quote

Personally I find it to be cluttered and visually aggressive.

Stepping back a bit, I couldn't agree more. That interface is basically the definition of the word cluttered 😂. It's true!

Of course, if you talk generally there's going be all sort of opinion on how an interface should be. But wouldn't you agree that if all these opinions would be prototyped and user-tested against their ability to let the user find a pre-determined "thing" (an abstract idea, a specific sentence, a specific picture, or a whole note) in their notes as successfully and as quickly as possible, they would all perform differently?

Of course to test, you have to build prototypes and whatnot, let's say we don't really have the time right now. So above I've tried to provide a bit of a deductive framework to sort of judge ahead of testing how such a "search your notes" system would perform.

Would it be possible to translate your argument -the clutteredness, the aggressiveness- to the terms of this framework? Or point out where the framework is wrong? In other words, how would you say it affects the search?

Interesting side question, why does Google Search not use tiles and a full page of columns, but a linear list? For me, comparing with why Keep experience, it's that I am interested in all note search results, mostly. Literally all. When I search "cooking" in my notes, I want all my cooking knowledge on my screen. But when I search on Google, I want only the top few results, and the lower ones only if the first ones are not good enough.

[PinkElephant 9,019]

EN uses a similar (of course much simpler) algorithm to determine the „relevance“ of search results. 

You can use it to get search results sorted accordingly:

[PinkElephant 9,019]

There is another option to show a card view (not much space on the iPhone screen, looks better on larger monitors).

Card view and sort search results by relevance can be combined. Everything is behind the 3 dots top right in the search screen.

[Tudeledoki 1]

25 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

EN uses a similar (of course much simpler) algorithm to determine the „relevance“ of search results. 

You can use it to get search results sorted accordingly:

It filters bij tags and sorts, but that is only point 1.1 of the whole process of my original post ;)! My problem is mostly what's in point 1.2, the human part. I can't do it well because I only see 7 notes at the same time on my screen, all of them with their contents (besides the title) cut off to 2 lines (a single line if it's got tags), on my Mac desktop client window. I have to click most of them because of this early truncation.

22 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

There is another option to show a card view (not much space on the iPhone screen, looks better on larger monitors).

Card view and sort search results by relevance can be combined. Everything is behind the 3 dots top right in the search screen.

Good point pointing the card view out! I think that's actually the view that can use this improvement. Card view fits only 1-3 notes in my single-column search result list. I only have a single column because card view retains the reading pane. Because the cards aim to show the whole notes' contents for most notes, it would make more sense if the card view would drop the reading pane. As a result it could show the cards in multiple columns. Extremely long notes that stil need to be truncated could then still be "opened" by clicking them.

Moreover, the cards should get variable height, become "not higher than necessary", saving more screen space. Now even a card with a note with a single line of content shows just as big, but mostly empty.

[PinkElephant 9,019]

No easy way out:

1) add more search terms (will be used with logical AND, this can work with or against you)

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040282613-Search-overview

2) use the advanced search syntax to add logical OR ( any: ) and NOT ( - ) to narrow down the search.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828-How-to-use-Evernote-s-advanced-search-syntax

3)  create and apply tags that help you to include or exclude notes from the search. Your Tag system should reflect what you save, and how you want to get at it.

If you are after recipes, maybe add the main component (Fish, beef, poultry, vegan), the type (starter, main, desert, snack, breakfast) and the region (northern, mediterranean, asian). 

Tags are maybe the most underestimated feature of EN.

[Tudeledoki 1]

Nothing wrong with the search features as far as I'm concerned. It's the way the results are displayed that can use an improvement!

[Tudeledoki 1]

So two posts ago I had edited in some insights I got thanks to you quite a bit after the initial post, I'll repeat that here!

Quote

Good point pointing the card view out! I think that's actually the view that can use this improvement. Card view fits only 1-3 notes in my single-column search result list. I only have a single column because card view retains the reading pane. Because the cards aim to show the whole notes' contents for most notes, it would make more sense if the card view would drop the reading pane. As a result it could show the cards in multiple columns. Extremely long notes that stil need to be truncated could then still be "opened" by clicking them.

Moreover, the cards should get variable height, become "not higher than necessary", saving more screen space. Now even a card with a note with a single line of content shows just as big, but mostly empty.

 

[Tudeledoki 1]

Bump 😊

[dbvirago 537]

I never cared for Keep, but I think if EN keeps improving Home, you will end up with something similar. 

[Tudeledoki 1]

I moved from Keep back to EN half a year ago. So unaware of the rate of improvement with Home. Hope you are right! But things I did see released this year like todos... I thought I'd create this topic. It would mean the world. Eye-screen search really low-bandwidth right now.

And note: Keep users are probably all like this. Keep has nothing: it is sheer subset of EN... save for this view. So at least Evernote can swallow that market if it wants. Of course, users wouldn't switch immediately, but you have to consider the possibility after so many years that Keep users use Keep because they actually like it better than EN —for which this view is the only identifiable reason.