Evernote iOS business card scanner feature suggestions

[ando 0]

The business card scanner is a useful new feature.  I can see using this regularly.

 

Here are some suggestions to make it better:

 

• make the scan results editable.  my first scan contained a mistake (a "-" in the email address wasn't picked up, even on a second try).  I couldn't edit the result--it only functions as a link.
• format phone numbers.  I realize this creates localization difficulty, but turning 2125551212 into (212) 555 1212 would be easier on the eyes.
• make addresses multi-field.  It's more important to me to make sure the address is accurate than to map it by clicking on it.  I'd prefer to see separate fields for street address, city, state, etc (also creates localization difficulty, I realize)
• create an attached vcard. would be great to be able to add the resulting contact directly into Contacts but keep the scan of the card in EN.
• make the image capture type option "sticky":  the "scan another card" option is nice, but more likely, I'll want to make sure the card I just scanned is correct, then I'll want to scan another by creating another note.  I don't want to have to choose post it/photo/biz card etc. again.  
• make LinkedIn integration optional.  LinkedIn integration is a nice idea, but I'm not likely to use it regularly.  The utility of the scan function is to keep a scan of a business card in Evernote and at the same time import the contact data into Contacts.  Make the LinkedIn prompts optional.

- Andy

[mcheng 106]

Hi Andy,

 

• The scan results are editable.  Try tapping on one of the fields and you will see a proper keyboard for the field type and the card view will zoom in to the area of the card where the field came from as well.  
• Phone number formatting missed this initial release but we will add back in soon.
• There is a setting that will allow you to automatically save all the scanned information from the card directly to your default Contacts account on your phone / iPad.  Just go to Settings > Business Card Settings  and you will see it
• Linkedin integration is optional but it provides a better experience as we can pull in more information and a picture of the person when we find them on LinkedIn.  We don't send any contact requests or post on your behalf nor will we ever do this unless you initiate the request.

Thanks for the feedback and please let us know how else we can make the product better for you.

[ando 0]

mcheng thanks for the thorough reply.  I appreciate that.

 

points 2,3,4 are solved.

 

still having trouble editing.  when I tap on the email address, I get a dialog box to send an email there or cancel.  when I tap on the address field, it asks me if I want to map that.

could you help me?

 

thanks

[mcheng 106]

When we considered editing of business card notes in Evernote, we wanted to make the experience feel natural to the product and the platform.  To achieve this on iOS we blended the contact fields with the meta data of the note to make viewing and editing business card notes feel more like plain notes. 

 

When viewing a business card note, tapping on the fields interacts with the data - so you can compose an email by tapping an email address, call / SMS by tapping a phone number etc.  

 

To edit the information, tap on the green "more ..." link at the bottom of the header and the fields will expand to allow you to edit, add and remove fields as well as edit any of the normal meta data of notes (notebook, tags, location, time & date, etc).

[Martin Packer 162]

@mcheng Can you position this against Evernote Hello? Sounds like it replaces it.

[ando 0]

@mcheng - thanks.  got it.

[BasieBand 42]

mcheng thanks for the thorough reply.  I appreciate that.

 

points 2,3,4 are solved.

 

still having trouble editing.  when I tap on the email address, I get a dialog box to send an email there or cancel.  when I tap on the address field, it asks me if I want to map that.

could you help me?

 

thanks

Agree with editing problem.

[BasieBand 42]

@mcheng - thanks.  got it.

Same here.  Thanks.

[Pedro S 2]

I love this new feature, except for one big  problem- that you can't add fields that are missed during the scan.

 

For example- cards I have been scanning have been regularly missing the business name on the card. In cases where the person is not in LinkedIn, I can't manually add the business name field, only correct the fields that Evernote finds on the first pass.

 

After the card has been saved, I can add the business name, but by that point, the contact has already been created, so that means I have to now edit everything TWICE- once evernote and then again in the contacts app.

 

Am I missing something? 

 

 

 

 

Hi Andy,

 

• The scan results are editable.  Try tapping on one of the fields and you will see a proper keyboard for the field type and the card view will zoom in to the area of the card where the field came from as well.  
• Phone number formatting missed this initial release but we will add back in soon.
• There is a setting that will allow you to automatically save all the scanned information from the card directly to your default Contacts account on your phone / iPad.  Just go to Settings > Business Card Settings  and you will see it
• Linkedin integration is optional but it provides a better experience as we can pull in more information and a picture of the person when we find them on LinkedIn.  We don't send any contact requests or post on your behalf nor will we ever do this unless you initiate the request.

Thanks for the feedback and please let us know how else we can make the product better for you.

[mcheng 106]

Hi Pedro,

 

We missed this as part of the initial release and will add the business name on the review screen in an upcoming release.  Thanks for the feedback.

[KeithF 5]

I would also like to see the created note have a configurable title which could use scanned data.  Having each note titled "Jon Doe - Scanned Business Card" is less than ideal.  The title configuration could look something like "%name - %company" with the result being "John Doe - Acme Inc." or "%lastname, %firstname - %company" which would result in "Doe, John - Acme Inc."

[JW3 12]

I agree with Keith, would be great to customize the title. Also would be nice to be able to add a custom field that denotes the contact was created in Evernote. Since these important names will typically be business related, I'd like to create an entry in the proper address book location. Currently, evernote just places these in the default Contacts. With a custom field, I could quickly determine which contacts I have to rearrange in my address book, when I'm at the computer.

[El Coach 1]

I, like the rest of the folks who have commented, think this is terrific feature and I am using it to catalog a vast number of cards. I too would like to be able to add fields that the scan has not picked up as I have cards that are both in English and Spanish, with corresponding indiosyncracies of unique addresses or phone numbers that do not format as they would in the US or UK. I am fortunate to have both an I-Phone and Samsung SIII but I would love to have you port this feature over to Android as well.

 

It would be nice if both the scanned cards and those in Hello were automatically filed in the same location within Evernote and not recquire human intervention to do so.

 

I am open to any suggestions as to tags for quick retrieval.

 

I am a huge fan of EN and recommend it to those not in the know.

[Helen Crozier 6]

Love this feature of the app and look forward to future improvements.

Please consider my issues/requests below. Some have been mentioned above, I am just adding my vote.

 

1. Please fix access to business card scanning feature by shifting choices to the left (post-it note reduced to post-it perhaps, change business card to 'card') so it does not require sliding - seems like there is too much friction and this great tool should be easy and fast to get to. I'd like even the idea of having a business card capture as a shortcut on the home screen. See this link for illustration.
2. App doesn't seem to scan company name even when it is directly under the person's name
3. Need to be able to add website url - surely this is important?
4. Ability to add more than just a note. - add a voice memo, add location, add second image say reverse of card, their twitter id if they tell us, the name of their cat.... - we should be able to add this all at the same time as we are snapping the card.
5. Option to add to address book - ask if we want to. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't so give us a choice please.
6. I have linkedin connected but it is very sporadic with regard to getting more information - on the other hand when I did a test card from someone I could not remember meeting nothing came back from linkedin except their photo. I was not an actual linkedin connection. What should we get with this connection?
7. When we've completed the card yes often we will want to add more info so let us do that.

I think that's all for the moment. It is great - overall the quality of the scan is pretty good but I feel as if these things should have been thought through as it doesn't feel quite finished! 

 

Looking forward to the next release 

cheers,

 

Helen

[BeJay 0]

Hi,

 

I also think the business card scan is a fantastic feature - well done.  However, as others have already commented as well, what I would wish for is a better integration into contacts.  Some of the fields which are correctly recognised within Evernote do not seem to be transferred into Contacts - this is mostly the case for address fields, but some other fields as well.  

 

Now, I am not sure whether this is a glitch in the App or whether its meant to be that way.  BTW my Linkedin integration is turned on.  Does anyone else have the same problem?

 

Cheers

 

Bjorn

[mcheng 106]

Thanks for the wonderful feedback

It would be nice if both the scanned cards and those in Hello were automatically filed in 

the same location within Evernote and not recquire human intervention to do so.

 

There is a setting in Evernote that controls where the notes are filed.  Look for Camera Settings > Business Cards (the depth under Settings depends on which version you are running) and you should find a setting to specify a notebook for all your scanned business cards as well as a way to specify tag(s) that will automatically be applied to each card

 

 

Please fix access to business card scanning feature by shifting choices to the left (post-it note reduced to post-it perhaps, change business card to 'card') so it does not require sliding - seems like there is too much friction and this great tool should be easy and fast to get to. ....

 

We are looking at ways to better educate users about the different modes of the camera and its various settings.

 

App doesn't seem to scan company name even when it is directly under the person's name

 

Sometimes the company name is difficult to distinguish.   Unlike names or addresses there aren't hints as to where it may be on the card.  Sometimes the name is in a different graphic font, or it may be a full graphic.  This is one of the reasons we use LinkedIn as well to help compliment the text recognition.

 

Need to be able to add website url - surely this is important?

 

Yes.  Sorry this didn't make the initial release.  We will add this in in a future release.

 

Ability to add more than just a note. - add a voice memo, add location, add second image say reverse of card, their twitter id if they tell us, the name of their cat.... - we should be able to add this all at the same time as we are snapping the card.

 

The ability to add an addional picture is on the roadmap.  We've not heard about the use case for the ability to add a note directly on the review screen but we will consider it.

 

Option to add to address book - ask if we want to. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't so give us a choice please.

 

Yes this is in the works.

 

I have linkedin connected but it is very sporadic with regard to getting more information - on the other hand when I did a test card from someone I could not remember meeting nothing came back from linkedin except their photo. I was not an actual linkedin connection. What should we get with this connection?

 

We supplement the information from the card with information from LinkedIn and use it to "auto correct" items that may have been mis-recognized.  For example, we pull the name, company and title from LinkedIn at a minimum and replace with the info from LinkedIn if there is a difference.  We also store the profile URL and are looking at other things we can do with LinkedIn to improve the experience.

 

Some of the fields which are correctly recognised within Evernote do not seem to be transferred into Contacts - this is mostly the case for address fields, but some other fields as well.  

 

We are working on saving the postal address to contacts.  This field is somewhat more challenging as we need to be able to separate out the information into state / province, city, etc.    We should be transferring all other fields correctly.  If we aren't, please let us know via support and we will look into this.

[jaybark7 3]

Have become a huge fan of this addition to the mobile apps. Had adopted Hello but greatly prefer this version already. 

 

I agree with much of the feedback. Adding the ability for a second picture would be great (e.g. second side of a business card as some have the name on one side and contact info on the other) 

 

The ability to add an audio note or other comments at time of creation would be a good feature as well. 

 

One error with text recognition I've had repeatedly has been recognizing a "-" in an email address. 

 

Another useful tool would be a way to create a contact note in evernote without a business card. I've started using evernote as my contact repository but would like to add contacts whose information I wrote down by hand and would love for this to appear in the same format as those created from a business card. Is there a way to simply "create a contact note" option. 

 

 

[WSConsulting 1]

Have become a huge fan of this addition to the mobile apps. Had adopted Hello but greatly prefer this version already. 

 

I agree with much of the feedback. Adding the ability for a second picture would be great (e.g. second side of a business card as some have the name on one side and contact info on the other) 

 

The ability to add an audio note or other comments at time of creation would be a good feature as well. 

 

One error with text recognition I've had repeatedly has been recognizing a "-" in an email address. 

 

Another useful tool would be a way to create a contact note in evernote without a business card. I've started using evernote as my contact repository but would like to add contacts whose information I wrote down by hand and would love for this to appear in the same format as those created from a business card. Is there a way to simply "create a contact note" option. 

 

I very much agree with this request for manual entry of Contact information using the same form / template as is provided when scanning a business card. With the new, improved, LinkedIn Integration, it would be great to be able to trigger the LinkedIn lookup for previously-scanned cards/contacts. I would also love to see the abillity to gather similar LinkedIn information for new, manually-entered, contacts (not created by a businness card scan).

[jelake 11]

I absolutely love this feature.  However, I just did a test of the "Send contact info" by testing with one of my own cards and found a concern...

 

The vCard that is attached to the e-mail has the First Name / Last Name fields concatenated into the First Name field and the address is similarly bundled into the street address field in the vCard.

 

I know this is driven by the way the data is entered in the My Contact Info setting in the EN app....the settings only have one field for name and address.  The problem is that when the recipient gets this vCard and wants to import my data into their contact management tool, the data isn't parsed correctly which is sloppy.

 

Surely vCard supports First Name/Last Name fields as well as Street/City/State/ZIP fields.

[mcheng 106]

 

Have become a huge fan of this addition to the mobile apps. Had adopted Hello but greatly prefer this version already. 

 

I agree with much of the feedback. Adding the ability for a second picture would be great (e.g. second side of a business card as some have the name on one side and contact info on the other) 

 

The ability to add an audio note or other comments at time of creation would be a good feature as well. 

 

One error with text recognition I've had repeatedly has been recognizing a "-" in an email address. 

 

Another useful tool would be a way to create a contact note in evernote without a business card. I've started using evernote as my contact repository but would like to add contacts whose information I wrote down by hand and would love for this to appear in the same format as those created from a business card. Is there a way to simply "create a contact note" option. 

 

I very much agree with this request for manual entry of Contact information using the same form / template as is provided when scanning a business card. With the new, improved, LinkedIn Integration, it would be great to be able to trigger the LinkedIn lookup for previously-scanned cards/contacts. I would also love to see the abillity to gather similar LinkedIn information for new, manually-entered, contacts (not created by a businness card scan).

 

 

 

See this Evernote "hack" that I posted in this topic

[mcheng 106]

I absolutely love this feature.  However, I just did a test of the "Send contact info" by testing with one of my own cards and found a concern...

 

The vCard that is attached to the e-mail has the First Name / Last Name fields concatenated into the First Name field and the address is similarly bundled into the street address field in the vCard.

 

I know this is driven by the way the data is entered in the My Contact Info setting in the EN app....the settings only have one field for name and address.  The problem is that when the recipient gets this vCard and wants to import my data into their contact management tool, the data isn't parsed correctly which is sloppy.

 

Surely vCard supports First Name/Last Name fields as well as Street/City/State/ZIP fields.

 

 

Hello Jelake,

 

Are you trying this on your Mac / Windows desktop with the Evernote scanner?  If so, concatenated names is a known issue as we have not had the chance to integrate our Name parsing algorithms on the desktop clients. We are working on this now and it should come to a future release.  One work around is to try using the "Email my Info" feature on iOS which does have these algorithms in place, it should generate a correct VCard attachment.

 

If this is happening with cards scanned on an iOS device, it may be a bug or an recognition issue with your business card - perhaps we can't safely tell what is your first vs. your last name so we treat the string as one.  If you're open to helping us improve our recognition algorithms, please submit a support ticket via the links below so that we can get an image of your card and take a look at the problem in more detail.

 

As for the address field, this is typically one of the hardest fields to pick apart as there are so many different standards for addresses across the world.  We do best effort to pick out the portions of the address into its different components.  This primarily is a problem if you plan to do something like a mail merge or mailing list generation and you would need something else to clean this information up for that purpose.  Otherwise, we optimize the address information so that if you were to click on the info it should show the address in Apple or Google Maps depending on which platform you are on.

[jelake 11]

First, huge thanks for the quick reply on this!

Second, I probably didn't explain myself as well as I could have. I confused the topic before by mentioning my own business card....I simply scanned my own card and sent my own info to myself so I could see what my recipients are seeing when this email comes across. Let me try again.

My experience comes from my iPhone 5S. I believe my issue has nothing to do with the card OCR data parsing. That part works very well (surprisingly well!!). The issue I'm having is when I use "Email my info" to send my own contact info to others. It arrives in the form of an email from "no-reply@evernote.com" which has my contact details in text and in a vCard. The text and photo look fine. But the vCard has the name and address concatenated. But really, it's not concatenated, it's just that the source for that info is the "My Contact Info" section under Settings/General/Camera/Business Cards. This area has only a single field for Name and a single field for Address so when the vCard is created, it just grabs all the data in those fields and sticks them into the First Name and Street fields. When this vCard is opened by the recipients system it's not going to parse correctly into their contact management system.

[mcheng 106]

Hello Jelake,

 

What you describe sounds like a bug.  I'll have our QA team verify and when confirmed we'll add a fix for the next release.  Thanks!

[mcheng 106]

Hello Jelake,

 

I just tried this on my Mac and the name is separated correctly.  Are you using Outlook or some other platform by chance?  Would you mind contacting support and having them submit a ticket on your behalf?  This way we can get more detailed information and pinpoint where the issue may be.  Thanks.

[jelake 11]

Hello Jelake,

 

I just tried this on my Mac and the name is separated correctly.  Are you using Outlook or some other platform by chance?  Would you mind contacting support and having them submit a ticket on your behalf?  This way we can get more detailed information and pinpoint where the issue may be.  Thanks.

 

I'm using Outlook for Mac 2011.  Since there's only one field for "name" in the app, I have to assume the Apple Mac app is parsing the first/last names.  If the EN app were doing this parsing, it would presumably show up correctly in any receiving app....right?

 

I'll contact support now.  Thanks again for your help and thorough response.