WeCanLearnAnything

48 minutes ago, DTLow said:

For sure, you are speaking

other speakers are also speaking, some even agree with you, others want different results

And with all the speaking, only a small % of the users are willing to pay for the product; to pay for the debug work

I am willing to pay for a (mostly) debugged, non-bloated product. That's not Evernote's current status, though.

I wonder how many people try Evernote, run into all the bugs and glitches and then quit because they think "Why is this note-taking app so bloated and complicated? And why should I trust this buggy software with my data?" I wonder how many paying customers have been lost because of this.

I'd be more than willing to look at any data from paying customers that separates their bug fix requests vs new feature requests as well as any marketing experiments done to see what causes people to pay.

Until such data is released, though, we can only speak about the user base as a whole as measured by data on these forums (or some other source?) and that base seems to want bug fixes a whole lot more than it wants new features. 

2 hours ago, DTLow said:

 

 

Would you acknowlege that many users have voted for Evernote to focus on other issues than bug fixes.

As someone pointed out, bugs are not a "crime against humanity"

Of course there are more votes for new features than bug fixes! The very structure and sub-titling of these forums assures this to be the case.

The new feature ideas and new feature requests tend to go into the "Product Feedback" forums where you can vote for them.

You'll find more than FOUR TIMES as many posts and about FIVE TIMES as many threads in the "Help" forums where people tend to report bugs and you cannot vote for these threads.

When it comes to measuring desire for bug fixes vs desire for new features, the structure of these forums guarantees that voting is an ultra biased metric.

Measuring by posts and threads, though, which I presume to be a better measure than votes, bug fixes seem to be the greater concern by a factor of 4 or 5.

The users are speaking and they are speaking clearly.

Or am I missing something?

8 hours ago, Liam Gretton said:

I completely agree. And with new features come new bugs too.

That would be awful, IMO.

I hope that Evernote's future is not more buttons and more features and more menus and more options and more drop down items and more UIs and more online chat and more Evernote-branded paraphernalia and more PowerPoint competition...

I just want to take notes in a program that doesn't go haywire when I press undo.

Evernote needs bug fixes. Not more complexity, not more bugginess, not more features (bloat).

10 hours ago, WeCanLearnAnything said:

...

As soon as my font sizes stop changing randomly, my cursor stops leaping around the screen, when formatting buttons don't get pressed randomly, when I can reliably use backspace and delete, when letters are consistently legible, when undo actually undoes stuff, my mind will be changed. 

...

I'll give the employees permission to email me when the bugs are fixed and I will likely come back then because the basic idea behind Evernote (the notes, not chatting, not socks, or not presentations) is so good.

5 hours ago, gazumped said:

...

However I see you're happy to believe the worst no matter what,  so I won't try to disturb your world view any further..

Hmm. I think I set a pretty reasonable bars for changing my mind and behavior.  

Perhaps you missed it when reading my post? Or perhaps you think my bars are unreasonable? (i.e. Evernote should do something other than bug fixes to convince me they are willing to fix bugs.)

5 hours ago, gazumped said:

.. I may have mentioned before that some things are easy to fix,  and have been;  other things require major rewrites and need a long time - years in some cases - of careful work to change.

I recognize that some bug fixes are extremely difficult and/or slow to fix. Perhaps that's why they keep allocating resources to new features while tolerating the bugs. Perhaps the returns to resources having proper font sizing are less than the returns to color tagging features and WorkChat and the next UI redesign. And if that's what the business needs and that's what the user base wants, that's a pretty good sign they won't meet my Dec. 31 deadline and I'll be migrating away soon.

On 10/9/2016 at 4:06 AM, gazumped said:

I don't think the guy(s?) that were out there sourcing stylish items to rebadge as 'Evernote' bags and socks would have made a great contribution to coding.  And at some stage the store was reportedly generating serious income.  It may well have put off the need to increase subscriptions for a year or more.  It was an experiment which became a distraction - like I said before,  probably because of discussions like these.

If socks and backpacks were such a big money maker, I'm sure that market would still be around. I'm guessing Evernote closed the market because it lost too much money and may have even accelerated the need to increase prices and cut features (e.g. availability on 3+ devices). Supervision, inspection, man hours, etc. are all required even if you outsource. All those resources could have and should have gone into bug fixes.

On 10/9/2016 at 4:06 AM, gazumped said:

Again,  what behaviour?  Evernote employees have said quite openly that they're not allowed to comment on ongoing route plans or development,  though (very) occasionally they do break the rules...

Someone (or some team) at Evernote is CHOOSING to allocate resources to new feature addition that could have gone into bug fixing. That BEHAVIOR is very obvious because many new features have been added while many 5-year-old bugs are still around. There was obviously no requirement to fix the Everbugs before working on those features. This was a choice. It was a behavior.

Evernote leadership's policy/thinking: "Should we divert resources away from WorkChat development so we can debug font sizing on all platforms? No! Let's keep putting resources into WorkChat dev. That font sizing bug is only 7 years old."

This is a refusal to fix a bug so to work on WorkChat instead.

Even the policy of not being allowed to comment on ongoing route plans or development is a CHOICE. It is a BEHAVIOR. They can CHOOSE to change it. I predict they won't, though, because their own foresight / honest predictions would be too damning. I think they know / intuit that the blank in the following sentence is a huge number.

Everbugs will live for ______ more years while employees add new features.

Earlier in this thread, JMichaelTEX asked for an Evernote employee's assessment on progress made in fixing the basic editor issues mentioned in the OP. Has anyone from Evernote responded? Not to offer predictions on route plans or anything in development or anything in the future at all, but completed bug fixes?

As soon as my font sizes stop changing randomly, my cursor stops leaping around the screen, when formatting buttons don't get pressed randomly, when I can reliably use backspace and delete, when letters are consistently legible, when undo actually undoes stuff, my mind will be changed. 

Sadly, I expect a regular stream of new features and all the editor's Everbugs to live up to the nickname I've given them.

I'm amazed that this thread was started in September 2015 and all the editor bugs that aggravate me are still alive and well. So far, my patience with Evernote has truly not paid off.

I think I'll give Evernote until December 31, 2016 to debug the editor's basic features and if they haven't, I'm going to find another note-taking program. I'll give the employees permission to email me when the bugs are fixed and I will likely come back then because the basic idea behind Evernote (the notes, not chatting, not socks, or not presentations) is so good.

7 hours ago, gazumped said:

What?  Please quote me one verifiable statement from Evernote support that says "we're not gonna fix this".  And.  Backpacks????

I don't have a quote. I'm making this inference by looking at their behavior.

My point is that Evernote has limited resources and can allocate them in various amounts into, say, fixing 5+ year-old bugs. And/Or WorkChat. And/Or backpacks and socks. They chose to put a LOT of resources into the latter two that could have - and, IMHO should have - gone into fixing the Everbugs.

Feel free to Google search Evernote backpacks and socks to learn more. That effort continued for, I believe, two years after Kincaid's famous post.

5 hours ago, DTLow said:

Evernote is issuing software updates all the time.  

The focus seems to be the highest priority items, and you can influence this by up-voting requests in the feedback forums (voting buttons in the upper left corner of the discussion)

This discussion currently has 10 votes.

I will definitely be up-voting a lot more bug-fixing requests!

4 hours ago, gazumped said:

Evernote has never 'refused' to fix bugs.  Silence isn't refusal,  just Evernote's normal disinclination to comment.

Problems with fonts,  printing and formatting are all tied up with the problem of making things work in four different operating systems and multiple OEM modified devices.  They're not bugs,  they're missing features....

I agree that cross-platform uniformity is a tough task and that some things like normal printing is a missing feature. But many of the other things I mentioned are bugs.

When I'm in the Windows editor and pressing ENTER and using horizontal rules make the font size change to the supposed-to-be-impossible 17, that's a bug, not a "missing feature".

When my Evernote editor sometimes fully displays and sometimes does not fully display italics depending on the arrow key I press, that's a bug, not a missing feature.

When pressing EDIT-UNDO or CTRL+Z causes the cursor to leap from wherever it is all the way to the top of the note while pressing down bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and highlight, that's a bug, not a missing feature.

When my defaults say to open a note with Tahoma font size 14 but I get a note with font size 13 - which then becomes stubbornly hard to change - that's a bug, not a missing feature.

Evernote's editor contains plenty of bugs to fix.

[Edit: And the Evernote team absolutely does have a long record of refusing to fix bugs. They acknowledge the bugs in the forums and in support tickets - this is not silence -  but refuse to fix them, choosing to expend far more resources into adding things like WorkChat, backpacks, Presentation Mode, recipe sharing, UI redesigns, etc.]

7 hours ago, gazumped said:

...it can't 'react to customer needs' because it is already doing so - in terms of the last 1,000 or so requests for features and changes.  Requests received today will be processed in a few months....

How about the many bug-fixing requests that have been coming in every few months for 5+ years? e.g. Making font sizes work, fixing printing, basic formatting, etc? Will Evernote refuse to fix those bugs (feature addition seems to be a higher priority) for another 5+ years?

I am still experiencing all the same note editor bugs and quirks that I've been suffering from since before this thread started. I stuck with Evernote's bugs during the CE's long development process assuming the CE would fix them. Why, I figured, would any major revamp hold on to those bugs?

Off the top of my head, Evernote's editor's enduring bugs and quirks include:

1. Cursors leaping all over the screen randomly, something Jason Kincaid famously reported on in 2014.
2. Frustratingly random font size changes, including to font sizes that are not supposed to be possible, such as 17. This bug is years old.
3. Difficulties formatting text that I copy/paste from other sources. Evernote is the only mainstream text editor that has these formatting issues. Libre Office, Google Docs, MS Word, One Note, etc. all handle such text formatting with no problems, at least in my experience. Sometimes extremely basic functions such as delete and backspace fail. I believe these bugs are many years old. David Pogue reported on this in Oct. 2015.
4. Major failures and glitches to the undo function in tables. I believe this is years old.
5. Printing remains so broken that I'm forced to copy-paste my Evernote content into other programs to print, well, anything. This issue is many years old.
6. Text not appearing properly on screen, such as parts of italic letters disappearing for some reason. Not sure how old this bug is.
7. Inability to add or remove rows or columns from tables in Evernote's browser version. I believe this issues is years old but am not sure.
8. Again in tables, the up key moves the cursor left and the down key moves the cursor right. I'm still waiting for Evernote to share the names of the people who thought this was a good idea to start out with and who decided to keep it around (perhaps forever?). I think this quirk is years old, too.

I thought that the whole point of the Common Editor was to get rid of all these weird glitches. [EDIT. And a second purpose: create a more consistent editor experience across platforms.]

Or perhaps the CE fixed some huge list of other bugs I'm not aware of (if so, bravo!) and the ones I listed are just not a priority?

4 hours ago, gbarry said:

The new editor is live on latest versions of Windows, Mac, Android, and the web client. If you check our forum product release notes (latest is pinned in each individual product feedback area) there are often editor fixes included as we resolve issues or make improvements. iOS is coming very soon, and will have v 1.5 of our latest editor baked in (the others are on 1.0 and will play catch up). PJ may be an alumnus, but we have a new PM managing this project who we'll be onboarding to our forums after we begin to consolidate editor requests and discussions into a global product feedback area. 

I'm very happy to hear that progress continues.

5 hours ago, jhd said:

Seems like a small thing, but it was this very "we're not fixing it so just live with it" flaw that made me bail for Microsoft OneNote a year ago. I'm anything but an MS shill - they've made more than their share of blunders, but *wow* - the difference in usability is night and day. Formatting is like a mini version of Word, and everything just works. Note taking went from an exercise in frustration to something I do all the time without really noticing - as it should be.

 

Evernote may have jumped the shark: http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-is-in-deep-trouble-2015-10

After fiddling around with OneNote for a while, I agree that its basic functions are more reliable than Evernote's. OneNote beats Evernote for anything involving text, typing, tables, lists, fonts, colors, etc.

But Evernote has far superior tagging and a much more consistent experience across platforms (at least the ones I use, browsers and Windows desktop). I believe that OneNote actually has entirely different tagging capabilities depending on which platform you're using. This is a little weird but something Microsoft, I think, will fix.

Or did you find a way to handle OneNote's shortcomings?

On 7/19/2016 at 1:06 PM, kan0ne said:

Ok. So I got my feedback which can be summed up as "known bug", "some rather inconvenient workaround suggestions" and "unknown when Evernote will address this". 

I think this is their standard response. It translates to "This bug has been a part of the Evernote experience for years and will remain so for many more."

23 hours ago, Tarrant64 said:

Could have told you that was going to happen.  

 

It's been this way for years and I stopped believe it was going to be fixed.  When I stopped believing in that was also when I stopped paying.  

Unfortunate, disappointing, and seemingly uncharacteristic of a company whose sole purpose is managing notes.  It's all great until you leave the world that is Evernote, and when formatting is everything they fall a bit short.  Short enough I consider it a failure until this stupid annoying behavior of copy paste is fixed.  

I'm not so sure how uncharacteristic this is. There are a lot of enduring bugs/glitches in Evernote's basic software functions.

Like you, I'll consider paying again after the company creates software with a LOT fewer 5+ year-old bugs and the basic functions just work.

It sounds like the employee who started this thread, @PeeJayTee, is no longer with the company. This forum now says that he's "Evernote Alumni"

I hope this change is not representative of the laudable efforts to fix the editor! 

Perhaps Evernote can assign another employee to attend to this thread and provide updates and previews regarding changes to the editor? 

On 7/9/2016 at 3:31 AM, WeCanLearnAnything said:

According to the blog post, they've been working on this project for nearly 3 years now... I wonder if there is anyone to tell which milestones have been reached, if the project is still underway, etc.

On 7/9/2016 at 10:34 AM, JMichaelTX said:

If that is correct, it is incredible!  I can't imagine it taking 3 years for a dedicated team to write a good rich text editor.  

It's not like this is some new technology -- it's been around for decades, and there are a multitude of good examples.

Rich text editors are not new technology, but I'm sure it's harder to make a uniform experience across Android, iOS, Macs, Windows, BlackBerry and various browsers. 

I wish I had the software knowledge and expertise to know if 3 years is a long time to develop that, but I don't know. I guess Evernote doesn't want us to know..

12 hours ago, Claude33 said:

I can't agree with this post more strongly. I have always resisted moving to a paid plan with Evernote because although I find the syncing, nested notebooks and tagging functions incredibly useful, the editor constantly drives me nuts. Every few years someone says something about fixing it, and usually it just gets worse. I mean, it's basically an HTML editor, for crying out loud, but they can't even iron the bugs out, let alone add useful features like styles, markdown, or even superscript. Personally, I'd settle for being able to hand-edit the code so I could at least tidy up the mess, but although most embedded HTML editors will let you do that, Evernote won't. I know there's probably some weird XML in there because Evernote have tried to add all sorts of bells and whistles to notes, but seriously, it just suggests a company that doesn't care about getting the foundations right.

By trying to force me to pay for a useful but insanely frustrating product, what Evernote are really doing is forcing me to take my frustrations seriously. If they fixed the basics, I would pay without hesitation. Multi-platform note-taking with good organization and search tools is extremely handy. But you have to get the basics right. Time to look for a new option.

Let us know if you find anything!

I like the way OneNote handles all the word processing aspects of notes, but dislike the notebook/section/page stuff and the inconsitent and hard-to-use tagging features. If you find something better, please message me!

12 hours ago, Bob in NV said:

Wow, I agree completely; I've never understood two things: how an app with "note" in its name could have such a bad note editor, and why Evernote users aren't more demanding about it getting fixed. On iOS, where I've used it for years, still very basic things don't work: copy/paste, font sizes, checkboxes.. I don't understand how people can use this editor day in and day out without noticing. But maybe people just don't use Evernote for notes - at least not on mobile. This is why I'm hard pressed to justify paying $45 a year for Evernote - why think that the editor will suddenly get fixed if it hasn't for the last five years?

To be fair, they have fixed some editor bugs in iOS, and greatly improved the Android editor, and I find the Mac editor quite usable. But iOS is still inferior to almost any other iOS editor you can name, so paying a yearly fee for its use it pretty hard to swallow.

According to the OP, Evernote has a "dedicated team" that's working on the note editor. I don't know what "dedicated team" means. Hopefully it means a group of 10+ people working full-time and exclusively on fixing the editor. I hope it does not just mean a bunch of employees with full-time obligations who are dedicating spare time to the endeavor.

According to the blog post, they've been working on this project for nearly 3 years now... I wonder if there is anyone to tell which milestones have been reached, if the project is still underway, etc.

On 7/7/2016 at 8:01 PM, alejandro5042 said:

I've never posted here but was guided here with the price increases.

I'm willing to pay the price increase if Evernote would focus on what is the most important part of the app: the note taking editor. It's crazy how I've used Evernote for years but the note taking abilities have languished. OneNote feels so great in comparison even though I very much dislike the freeform note writing. Please focus on Evernote becoming a pleasure to use. Please update the typography, spacing, etc--make it look like I'm typing a masterpiece and not using Notepad. Please add a dark theme that's easier on the eyes if you type notes all day. I don't care about Work Chat or Presentation Mode... nobody I know uses these features. We use Evernote as a much easier note taking app than Notepad[++], Word, or random online things. Reduce or hide the cruft... just focus on the main part of the app: the notes! ....the reason I came to it in the first place!

I agree. I've been using OneNote more and more recently and anything involving typing, tables, font, font size, kerning, formats, copy/paste, printing, etc. is dramatically better and easier. (Only Evernote's superior tagging is keeping me around.)

Evernote employees ought to use both for a while to get a feel for the quality gap.

I'm not sure, though, how important the note editor really is to the Evernote team or user base. Perhaps you and I and the people we know primarily use the note editor, but the majority of the user base uses it so sparingly that they don't run into all the glitches you and I do. Perhaps there are a lot of happy WorkChat and Evernote-branded socks-wearing people out there who do not post in these forums and thus those users are the real priority for Evernote. That would explain why bugs in Evernote's note editor have endured to celebrate so many birthdays.

Is anyone at Evernote still working on this big note editor revamp? If so, is there any update?

I'd love to know when/if the "basic infrastructure/unified code base" will be in place and when/if all the notorious bugs will be squashed.

In an earlier post, I shared my "dream" announcement from Evernote, an announcement that would say they were going to fix bugs rather than add new features.

Instead, the new announcement is massive price hikes and a 2-device limit, the latter of which appears to break every promise and message of Evernote marketing for years. Not a single specific improvement was offered to justify these changes. In other words, the only thing we know for sure is that Evernote's Basic plan is getting dramatically worse.

Perhaps in this thread someone can mention improvements to the note editor that justify these changes?

On 6/11/2016 at 7:58 PM, JMichaelTX said:

...

I know of at least one, very complex piece of software that the developers assert is bug-free:

They Write the Right Stuff | Fast Company | Business + Innovation 

This article is inspirational... and it's from the nineties! Every company of every type should have a team whose sole mission is to find flaws.

3 hours ago, s2sailor said:

Some will never be fixed.  That is the nature of software design.  The hope is that the majority of ones causing uses grief do get fixed.  

I can't say I know a lot about software design. I can say this, though:

1. If some bugs will never be fixed, Evernote ought to ensure that every user knows what those bugs are before committing much time or data to Evernote.
2. Among the bugs discussed repeatedly in the forums over the years, can you name the ones that should never be fixed? It seems to me that the recurring threads are all about basic features (font size, copy/paste, bullet list alignment, etc.) and those should work, shouldn't they?

1 hour ago, s2sailor said:

I can't imagine any company ever doing this.  I'm sure internally they have some type of tracking and prioritization mechanism but nothing positive would be gained by making this available external to the company.  It would just result in endless and worthless debate over why bug #14 is not #1 or why Jim does not appear to be closing defects at the same rate as Mary.

What kind of internal tracking system would allow the same bugs to exist for 7+ years? (If you search, you will find many of the same bugs being discussed in posts from 2008. The threads are eerily similar.)

Users could vote for most important bugs to fix. 

Jim and Mary could report on the difficulties they have fixing their bugs and open up a thread for each bug. If one takes longer than another, that's fine. At least we'd know the name of the person trying to fix it and what they trying.

As for nothing positive happening from a public list, I think it is the privacy of their list (or whatever tracking system they use) that's the real problem. A private note discussing a 7-year-old bug is bad, but quiet. If an official public list acknowledged that no employee was even trying to fix a 7-year-old bug, that would be mega embarrassing and would spur a lot of positive action. Maybe they'd finally focus on fixing things rather than adding new features.

A more general response: Can you imagine a slower way of handling bugs than what Evernote does now? How many 3, 5, or  8+ year-old bugs remain unfixed?

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

I favour the system where requests are posted in the feedback forum and users vote. This allows Evernote to devote resources to high priority items.

Also, do you have a suggestion for funding the work by the DRI, particularly when they're working 100% on a specific item

If Evernote users want to vote on bug fix importance, that's fine.

As for the DRI, the OP says that they have "... created a dedicated team focused on improving the note editor..." so DRIs would be selected among them since fixing the editor is already their job.

On 5/30/2016 at 5:20 PM, JMichaelTX said:

@PeeJayTee:  It has be almost 9 months since you wrote this.  What is your assessment on your progress in achieving the objectives you stated above?

It seems there are still many complains about the most basic capability, features of the Evernote Editor, both in EN Win and EN Mac.

...

Please note these issues, in particular:

1. Editor not responding properly to either the Delete key or Backspace key
2. Format is not retained with copy/paste with other apps, like MS Word.
3. Users have to revert to using just basic plain text
4. the editor is still plagued with some of the same problems (bullet lists, for example) it has had since way back in 2008   [This is appalling and screams for an explanation from an Evernote employee. Something like "We haven't fixed this over the past 8 years because _______________________."]
5. Improper handling of lists (bullet and numbered), especially when a copy/cut/paste or drag/drop is done within a list.

 

Can I make a suggestion to Evernote employees about bug fixes? For the sake of transparency, make a list of all bugs that team is aware of and post progress in this forum. You could track all the bug fixing in something like the picture below.

Lastly, you could implement a simple but strictly enforced rule: If any DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) has any unfixed bugs over 12 months old, then he/she spends 100% of their working hours on fixing that bug until it is fixed. 

Thoughts?