Major regressions in Evernote UI and in tech support

[User 0]

TL; DR: Web clipper UI gone down toilet.  Tech support box limited to 500 characters so I can't even explain the problem.  Wondering why I use Evernote anymore.

 

I've been using Evernote for many years.  I have observed a steady decline in usability and functionality of the web clippers.  Countless times I have filed tech support tickets explaining problems, such as changes in UI that make simple operations like tagging take several times as long and many more clicks, or saved clips that get stuck and never sync to the server (my clipper icon still has 5 unsynced clips...and has for over a year now).  Every time I received basically a boilerplate response, and nothing improved as a result; the same bugs are there, and the rest continues to degrade.

 

As a result I have found myself using the web clipper in Firefox less and less--and therefore have found myself using Evernote less and less.  Instead I more frequently use other Firefox extensions to save and search through web content.

 

But after doing a lot of web content saving the past few days, I decided to give the web clipper another try.  In the past I've tagged nearly everything I've clipped--isn't that one of the whole points of Evernote? 

 

But the current clipper UI does not even allow me to tag clips anymore.  Instead I have to wait for the clip to be synced to the server, then click the Edit link, then wait for a new browser window to open, then wait for the Evernote AJAX interface to load the note I just clipped, then add a tag, and then wait another 30 seconds (!) for a three-character tag to be saved--seriously, I added one tag to a clip and it took over 30 seconds for the circling-checkmark icon to finish and say "Saved".

 

In the past, the clipper let me add tags from an autocompleted list before even saving the clip.  But that useful ability was inexplicably dumped overboard at some time in the past when the clipper was updated.  I can't fathom why; was it too complicated for the developers to handle?  That explanation makes about as much sense as the removal of the feature--but what good explanation could there be?  (Refactoring UI is never, ever an acceptable excuse: you don't release a new UI until it's functionally equivalent.  Your users are not supposed to be your guinea pig beta testers unless they choose to be!)

 

After finding this absurd regression in usability too much to stomach, I decided to waste my time by filing another tech support ticket.  Except this time, I realized how utterly pointless it would have been: there is a 500-character limit on the tech support form.  That's less than 3 SMS messages worth of text.

 

Evernote, what are you thinking?  Why bother making infuriatingly stupid changes to frustrate your users and discourage them from even reporting problems to you?  Why not just close down your tech support altogether?  For that matter, why bother making infuriatingly stupid UI changes to frustrate your users and discourage them from even using Evernote?  Why not just close down the company, or sellout to some advertising company and go live in the Carribean?

 

Some people may criticize me for making this post.  If so, to them I say, I wouldn't bother if I didn't care.  Evernote used to be great.  It could be again.  But it feels like the same people making decisions at YouTube are making decisions at Evernote lately--and those changes make me want to go far, far away.  I don't have to use Evernote; there are innumerable ways to do what it does.

 

I wanted to send an email to someone higher up in Evernote, some corporate office or VP or something, to tell someone who can actually do something about this stuff.  But, of course, they have completely insulated themselves from their customers; the only options are the 500-character tech support form and this forum.  If that itself is not a bad enough sign about Evernote's direction, I don't know what is.

 

I hope someone who matters reads this and turns Evernote around.

 

P.S. After posting this, I see that the top 15 threads in this forum are bot-posted spam.  I can't help but wonder if Evernote is simply falling apart.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

With respect to the spam, whatever gets through the automatic filters has to be manually removed. If that spam takes place at say, 3am eastern time (my time zone) I am not likely going to see it. While there are moderators in other time zones too, 3am eastern is 12am pacific, and 6am for the western most parts of Europe. That covers where most of us moderators are from, odds of us happening to log in those times (I'm certainly not online at 3am...) are slim.

I am a volunteer, I cleared that spam at about 7am eastern time on a weekend. I hope that was quick enough for you. Sometimes, while on the clock, Evernote staff will log in, but during the times listed above, staff are not on the clock. Since this is a user forum, and in order to ensure enough resources for the support and development staff you seem to think are falling into shambles, Evernote does not hire staff to monitor the board 24/7 to delete spam.

I don't use Firefox, but using the clipper for safari, I have no problem with it syncing my clippings expeditiously, and tagging in the clipper is no problem, usually it has tags pre-selected for me so I don't even need to add them myself.

I know Evernote has posted elsewhere that there are some challenges specific to the Firefox API which is why it hasn't seen the same swift updates that other browsers have.

As for support, if you are premium you could always use the chat feature.

Otherwise I agree 500 characters is slim, but it's enough to se:

"Trouble tagging and syncing new clipping with Firefox web clipper."

Or

"On Mac, note disappeared and is not in trash. Sync is up to date, search does not return note. Does not show up on web"

Also, just like the doctor, you may want to limit each ticket to a single problem so they can get properly shuffled or elevated to the right support staff.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

TL; DR: Web clipper UI gone down toilet.  Tech support box limited to 500 characters so I can't even explain the problem.  Wondering why I use Evernote anymore.

 

I've been using Evernote for many years.  I have observed a steady decline in usability and functionality of the web clippers.  Countless times I have filed tech support tickets explaining problems, such as changes in UI that make simple operations like tagging take several times as long and many more clicks, or saved clips that get stuck and never sync to the server (my clipper icon still has 5 unsynced clips...and has for over a year now).  Every time I received basically a boilerplate response, and nothing improved as a result; the same bugs are there, and the rest continues to degrade.

 

As a result I have found myself using the web clipper in Firefox less and less--and therefore have found myself using Evernote less and less.  Instead I more frequently use other Firefox extensions to save and search through web content.

 

But after doing a lot of web content saving the past few days, I decided to give the web clipper another try.  In the past I've tagged nearly everything I've clipped--isn't that one of the whole points of Evernote? 

 

But the current clipper UI does not even allow me to tag clips anymore.  Instead I have to wait for the clip to be synced to the server, then click the Edit link, then wait for a new browser window to open, then wait for the Evernote AJAX interface to load the note I just clipped, then add a tag, and then wait another 30 seconds (!) for a three-character tag to be saved--seriously, I added one tag to a clip and it took over 30 seconds for the circling-checkmark icon to finish and say "Saved".

 

In the past, the clipper let me add tags from an autocompleted list before even saving the clip.  But that useful ability was inexplicably dumped overboard at some time in the past when the clipper was updated.  I can't fathom why; was it too complicated for the developers to handle?  That explanation makes about as much sense as the removal of the feature--but what good explanation could there be?  (Refactoring UI is never, ever an acceptable excuse: you don't release a new UI until it's functionally equivalent.  Your users are not supposed to be your guinea pig beta testers unless they choose to be!)

 

After finding this absurd regression in usability too much to stomach, I decided to waste my time by filing another tech support ticket.  Except this time, I realized how utterly pointless it would have been: there is a 500-character limit on the tech support form.  That's less than 3 SMS messages worth of text.

 

Evernote, what are you thinking?  Why bother making infuriatingly stupid changes to frustrate your users and discourage them from even reporting problems to you?  Why not just close down your tech support altogether?  For that matter, why bother making infuriatingly stupid UI changes to frustrate your users and discourage them from even using Evernote?  Why not just close down the company, or sellout to some advertising company and go live in the Carribean?

 

Some people may criticize me for making this post.  If so, to them I say, I wouldn't bother if I didn't care.  Evernote used to be great.  It could be again.  But it feels like the same people making decisions at YouTube are making decisions at Evernote lately--and those changes make me want to go far, far away.  I don't have to use Evernote; there are innumerable ways to do what it does.

 

I wanted to send an email to someone higher up in Evernote, some corporate office or VP or something, to tell someone who can actually do something about this stuff.  But, of course, they have completely insulated themselves from their customers; the only options are the 500-character tech support form and this forum.  If that itself is not a bad enough sign about Evernote's direction, I don't know what is.

 

I hope someone who matters reads this and turns Evernote around.

 

P.S. After posting this, I see that the top 15 threads in this forum are bot-posted spam.  I can't help but wonder if Evernote is simply falling apart.

Hi. Thanks for sharing your experience.

1. I imagine the five-hundred character limit is there for the support staff's sanity. Reading thousands of characters of text for each issue before they have even communicated with you is a little tough, I guess, and would make it difficult to move on to help others. Start with the five-hundred (The Firefox web clipper no longer lets me easily add tags and it doesn't sync some clippings."), get in touch, and then send the rest of your complaint. That would be my opinion.

2. Could you post your ticket numbers here? That will help staff to follow up with you.

3. Other options for contacting Evernote include snail mail, twitter, and chat. Understandably (I think), top level management is not immediately accessible to their 80 million (?) customers. It makes semse (to me) to go through support and engineers first.

4. The forum is independent of the Evernote service and, like many other forums, is vulnerable to spam, especially at certain hours of the day. Moderators (users like yourself) do their best to stay on top of it. We'll try to do better.

[jefito 5,589]

My experience with the web clipper is different. I use it regularly, but not frequently: maybe one or two clips a day. I do find that it often offers a pre-selected tag list, sometimes exactly what I want. Editing tags causes a slide-out panel to appear, and that's all auto-complete. I like it that there are options to clip a screen shot or simplified article and other options, plus annotation, but mostly I just make a selection on the site, pull up the clipper, clip and tag it, and it's done. The UI seems pretty well laid out to me, and just seems to work; earlier versions had more problems clipping on certain web sites, but this one seems a lot more robust for the sites that I clip anyways. The web clipper has seemed pretty stable for me for awhile. It's definitely useful to me. Browser is Chrome on Win 7, on a couple of different machines, if that matters.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

My experience with the web clipper is different. I use it regularly, but not frequently: maybe one or two clips a day. I do find that it often offers a pre-selected tag list, sometimes exactly what I want. Editing tags causes a slide-out panel to appear, and that's all auto-complete. I like it that there are options to clip a screen shot or simplified article and other options, plus annotation, but mostly I just make a selection on the site, pull up the clipper, clip and tag it, and it's done. The UI seems pretty well laid out to me, and just seems to work; earlier versions had more problems clipping on certain web sites, but this one seems a lot more robust for the sites that I clip anyways. The web clipper has seemed pretty stable for me for awhile. It's definitely useful to me. Browser is Chrome on Win 7, on a couple of different machines, if that matters.

I have found that migrating fromone browser to another usually solves my problems (if I am having any). I usually use Chrome and Safari. Chrome, if memory serves me, is the most robust of the web clippers at the moment. The OP is on Firefox. I'll give it a spin later today.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Yes chrome was the first to get the slick new clipper..... Though Evernote really got the safari clipper caught up to chrome (though there was a long period of latency, understandable). Firefox is a bit of a red headed stepchild as far as the clipper goes these days. I think a few API related hurdles are slowing things down.

[jbenson2 2,147]

I wanted to send an email to someone higher up in Evernote, some corporate office or VP or something, to tell someone who can actually do something about this stuff.  But, of course, they have completely insulated themselves from their customers; the only options are the 500-character tech support form and this forum.  If that itself is not a bad enough sign about Evernote's direction, I don't know what is.

 

I hope someone who matters reads this and turns Evernote around.

 

 

 

I was hamstrung in the past with the 500 character limit. Rather than squeeze everything into the 500 character restriction, I submit "Support Requests" & "Suggestions" with a link to my Evernote note or to a forum post. That allows me more flexibility with graphics, formatting, and screen grabs to expand on the issue.

[gbarry 2,658]

A couple things--

 

The FF web clipper. It is indeed not exactly where we would like it to be--our Clipper forums here can attest to that, and of course you need only to look to the Chrome and Safari clippers to see coming direction. I'm on FF 23, and use the clipper pretty regularly, and it's still auto-populating all of my tags--so it may be a particular issue that we can investigate further. I would also double check to make sure you are on a more recent version of FF.

 

The submitted tickets, when I reviewed, were closed as feature or app adjustments that were passed on to the team--at both times concerning the Android's menu button functionality, and the ability to submit support requests while logged in. Both of which were passed on to the team.  Support requests sent from in-app are something that we are working on, and some of our clients (don't have Android readily available to test) have implemented. If you are already logged into the web, you can also submit directly from there.

 

The 500 character limit lets us respond to more users faster--and helps constrain support inquiries in a way that improves our efficiency. I'll check to see if we would like to expand, but in most cases 500 characters should be enough to describe a problem fully from the outset. JB's workaround above makes complete sense--support discussions and other materials can be provided via link or attached. I completely understand how a support request that is related to new functionality or feature request would take more than 500 characters to describe.

 

Forum spam: you messaged when a lot of us are sleeping and it wasn't cleared. The more successful and useful a web presence (our forums) the more likely we are to get hit by spam. Those are not bots, btw, those are people paid to spam--we're working on ways to better blacklist, but for now we need to manually remove from time to time.