Ian Small

Unfortunately, it's an architectural problem due to constraints in the underlying infrastructure, not a simple matter of adding a setting. One of the things we are working on this year is reworking a significant part of the infrastructure to give us more reliability, more scalability and - what matters in this case - more flexibility. Once we have that flexibility, we will start to explore what to do with it. -- ian

My philosophy is pretty simple: get Evernote back on the path of developing and shipping quality software, use that as a foundation for accelerating customer-focussed innovation, and thereby put the company onto a sustainable growth trajectory - a trifecta that is ultimately the best combination of things that we can do for our users. All of our community knows that each of those is an undertaking - which makes it easy for me to be transparent with you all about the effort involved, and to involve you all in the process we're going through this year via the Behind the Scenes videos. As I said in January's blog post, we're going to make the product we all know and depend on more worthy of our ongoing affection, although I recognize that in navigating this process we're almost unavoidably going to disappoint some folks based on the places we focus and the choices we make. Our commitment to early beta testing, along with early disclosure of our direction through the videos, is helping us course correct and identify unanticipated challenges as early as possible in the process. Finally, the company continues to be on sound financial footing, getting even sounder this year. We're a private company, so it's relatively easy to throw a bunch of fud around concerning our financials, but two key facts speak for themselves: First, since the statement quoted above that Chris made in 2016, we haven't raised any venture funding. And second, we're still here. A rational interpretation of those easily confirmable facts, coupled with the observation in the New York Times article that I expect us to be profitable on an annual basis for the first time this year, would be that over that time we've been successful in managing our burn rate against cash reserves, and that we're now growing up into profitability. While I know that it's sometimes more entertaining to spin more elaborate theories, it really doesn't need to be - and more importantly, it isn't - any more complicated than that. I continue to appreciate the patience of every one of our users while we work to create a better Evernote, the Evernote that they deserve in return for their commitment. Back to lurking now.

@RavBoy... always lurking. But also not inclined to make commitments until I know we are going to deliver on them. Trying to get us into the underpromise and overdeliver habit, which is harder than you might think! Right now we are 100% focussed on trying to make the existing Evernote we have work better, by stamping out bugs, unifying the codebase, and making the Evernote experience more coherent and more consistent across devices. Hence the focus of pretty much all the Behind the Scenes videos so far. That being said, let me take your specific question under advisement.

Good catch, we should have said "Undo" instead of command Z. So it is the Undo equivalent. Sorry for the confusion.

Fair feedback. As we go forward, we will try to do better at being explicit at messaging some of this. There are some challenges to this, of course: Sometimes, it's the feedback we get in the preview or beta that tells us what features need to be prioritized and implemented (either from our punch list, or features which were on the bubble, or revisions/extensions/modifications to what we've already shipped). We learn through the preview and beta process; there are multiple concrete examples of this happening already with the new note editor. We all use different parts of Evernote so generally warning people off a preview or beta version because there are missing capabilities ("there are missing capabilities so use the current version") is hard to do, and misleading - because for user A there may be no missing capabilities at all, and for user B there may be huge gaps. User A gets warned away and misses out on an improved version. User B doesn't try it and give us feedback we may need. In running the preview or beta programs, in an audience the scale of Evernote's, we have an (understandably) large range in software knowledge amongst our user base. Putting a bounding box around a preview or beta in language everybody understands can be challenging. For instance, during the editor preview, we had no shortage of feedback about non-editor issues. And finally, if we have a robust, bug-free implementation that may still be missing some key features, from the standpoint of a new user - it is "complete". Because they are not missing the capability they never used. For obvious reasons, we'd like to get those new users on to the newer versions. None of this takes away from some underlying truths in your feedback. Independent of this thread, we have already been thinking about ways we can improve our beta and preview programs, because we know we have work to do to improve in this area. Thanks! ian

Hi all - First, Shane's question relates to the new "checklist" feature which was demonstrated in the second Behind the Scenes video on the new note editor. (Hint: if you haven't seen that video, go watch it now, none of this thread will make sense otherwise! I'll wait until you're done.) Internally, everyone at Evernote can participate in testing by "dogfooding" new builds, so we've all had access to the checklist feature for a while now as our development and design teams work out the kinks in that and other parts of the new Note Editor. So for Shane, it was a reasonable followup question to ask me about one of the features we demonstrated in an earlier BTS video - a feature which created a lot of response from the community. Second, to try to help sort out the apparent confusion around "betas": The Evernote web beta - what I tend to refer to in the videos as the "modern web experience" - is broadly available to any Evernote user and has been in place for about a year now. We still label this build beta because we do not view it yet as feature complete - there are a few key features missing before we would consider it our GA web experience. Nonetheless, as you've seen in a number of the videos, the Evernote web beta is what we are using as the basis for our forward-looking web work. A preview release of the new note editor has been available by invitation only (and under NDA, which is why you haven't heard about it broadly outside of the relevant Behind the Scenes video) to a relatively small audience for the last several months. Over that period, we've been collecting feedback and modifying our implementation in response to that feedback, working on bugs, and converging on performance levels that we are happy with, all while continuing to work through the feature punch list which we believe (based on the feedback we have received to date) will constitute a complete version. At this point, the new note editor has been released as an optional beta to a small % of users who are using our modern web experience (the Evernote web beta). So, as some posts have commented above (and shown screenshots), if you are using the Evernote web beta, you may have access to the note editor beta in the bottom right corner of the window. Early versions of the new note editor have also been bundled into preview releases of an early Windows client, released to a very small number of users by invitation only (and also under NDA). At this point, there is no other way to get access to the new note editor. We are not looking for individuals to sign up to the note editor beta at this point. We have transitioned from small numbers of individual users invited one-by-one to the preview into small percentages of the entire Evernote web user population being given access to the beta. We still have a lot of work to go for the new note editor to be ready for broad release; we appreciate your patience while we continue to work on bugs, performance, and remaining functionality. Third, you can expect *more* betas, not less. One of the things I've been pretty consistent about in our communications is that we're adopting a posture of testing everything we're working on - from very early stages where we test design mockups with individual users, through to very early prototype builds that we test under NDA on an invitation-only basis (thanks to all of you who have been participating and helping in one or more of those), through to phased beta rollouts to larger segments of our audience - all of which happens before we go GA on a particular component. We have restructured the way in which we do development at Evernote so that multiple subsections within the product can be driven independently, which in turn means that we can beta different "parts" of the product independently. Our ability to beta subsections of any build independently of the rest is something that you will see more of in the future. It's part of what we need to be able to do in order for Evernote to return to innovation at speed. Fourth, with respect to tags, my Spidey-sense detects the beginning of a small-scale twister as members of the community, with the best of intentions, take two sentences I said in a video and start to extrapolate what they could possibly mean. If there is an actual twister, it's always wise to take cover. But at the same time, we should probably try to avoid creating man-made twisters when it's not really necessary. In order to attempt to defuse this twister mid-formation, let me re-emphasize what I said on the video: (1) tagging is super important to a big chunk of our users (2) tagging is supported in wildly varying ways across different devices (just try Android vs. iOS, if you don't believe me) and (3) we'd like to take the best of tagging from across various devices and make a more consistent, coherent tagging interface across all devices in the Evernote family. What I specifically didn't say: that we were somehow going to rework the theory of tags. No. Not happening. Fifth, one more observation that I suspect is generally applicable beyond this particular thread: if I say that one of the things we're going to focus on in an *upcoming* episode of Behind the Scenes is topic X, and that episode hasn't aired yet, it's probably a safe bet that whatever you can see in a production version of Evernote you have downloaded today regarding topic X is probably *not* representative of what we're going to talk about. After all, we wouldn't need a Behind the Scenes video series for that... we'd just point you at the software. Hope all that is helpful. I'm going to go back to lurking now, and to lighting off fireworks. To those of you reading this from the US, happy holidays! ian

Hi everyone - Dropping back out of lurking mode to provide some additional insight and to reflect on some of the threads above…. There is lots of valuable feedback in this discussion - thank you! I’m sorry if we have disappointed some of you with a perceived lack of responsiveness in the comment threads on these videos. As you would probably expect, our top priority is listening for input and watching for new insights that emerge from these forums and also from all the other community and social mechanisms through which these videos are distributed. During initial design, we focus on talking to and learning from individual users. When we move into preview releases, we engage one-on-one with tens and hundreds of users. As we ramp tests to thousands, tens of thousands and ultimately into millions of users, we start looking increasingly to quantitative data to inform how successful we are being because the conversation doesn't scale otherwise. That’s just the simple mechanics of how things need to work at the scale of Evernote. Concretely, the new note editor has been out in preview release with select Evernote web users for the last 75 days, ramping from a few hundred users trialing very early builds to now thousands of users kicking the tires in a larger-scale (but still early) beta. In the private discussion attached to that original preview program, the conversation around some of the same topics raised here has been intense, resulting not just in bug fixes but also in changes in design and implementation that we are still continuing to work on as I type this. Understandably, we have focussed our energy on going back and forth with and supporting users who are evaluating this build for us in the wild. (Some of you on this discussion are also involved in the private preview program discussion; thank you for your feedback and contributions there!) This is not to say that we don’t value your responses to these videos. As I said above, we read every one to look for new insights and observations. In general, I think that the early response to the first few Behind the Scenes videos has proven that our decision to start communicating with the community through this video mechanism has been a good one. However, I recognize that as we increase this style of communication out to you, it naturally bumps up your expectation of our ability to be able to engage both interactively and on a lot of fronts at the same time. We’ll do our best to engage as we are able, but our priorities internally are clear: First and foremost, we need to focus on shipping quality software that delivers the more coherent and consistent Evernote experience that I blogged about earlier this year. We are still relatively early in that process; we have a long way to go. When we are able to engage, we try to prioritize interactions that inform us of how to refine the software in flight, or to identify and eliminate bugs. That means we won’t necessarily be able to circle around to catch everyone up across all the different communication channels and all the threads. Apologies. And finally, I want to get us out of the habit of making promises we don’t meet. I am not a fan of making commitments we're not 100% sure we can deliver on. So unfortunately that means most of your questions about additional feature X, anticipated delivery date Y, and what about Z - no matter how reasonable! - are likely going to go unanswered until we can back up an answer with facts, or better yet, software. I truly appreciate your ongoing patience with us while we focus as much energy as we are able to muster on building a better Evernote for you. We are trying to test everything we are doing early and often. And we continue to listen to the feedback from those tests and to evolve in response to that feedback. Finally, for those of you who have stuck with this post this far… we know tags are super important to a significant percentage of our user base. (As an aside, we’re trying to improve support for them on Evernote implementations where tags are currently and inexplicably somewhat second-class citizens.). Tags in the modern Evernote web environment aren’t hidden behind a click. They have always been shown at the bottom of the note editor screen (a particularly observant s2sailor noticed this in the video - full points!), which is different than where they are on the Windows build or on the Mac build. There are advantages to this, and as has been observed in this thread, there are also clearly some disadvantages as well. This continues to be a source of ongoing discussion internally. Going back to lurking now. And probably shooting another video in my copious spare time... ian

I really will go back to lurking soon, but while we're at it... To your (1), I will observe that one of the things we showed in the video was the ability for to type the first few letters of a tag or a notebook, have that tag or notebook be automatically suggested, and add it as a filter (eg. "Mexico" was a tag). I understand that incremental search may not be up your alley, but I suspect that for most users, auto-matching what you are typing to possible tag names, notebook names, space names, recent searches, etc. is faster, more interactive, and likely more effective than needing to type or pick "tag:" or "notebook:" first, followed by auto-matching and picking. Our goal is to design for the breadth of the constituency (both paying and non-paying, although we pay the most attention to paying users and those who are likely to become paying users). I completely understand your mileage on a given design approach may vary. To your (2), obviously this is a super power user capability. We have been looking at various options around what the default search logic is, and we have contemplated what full boolean logic would take. One of the things you'll find about me is that I don't make promises that I don't know that I'm going to deliver on. In this area, while we have been and are looking at it, no promises at this point. Thanks for investing the time to respond. -- ian

At a high level: web, mac, windows all roughly the same. Android, iOS roughly the same. Math left as an exercise to the reader... -- ian

Hey gang - There is some useful feedback in this thread which I have read with interest. Thank you! There are also a lot of concerns raised, whether it be feedback to the specific content we showed, or all sorts of interpolations and extrapolations built off what we showed (and in some cases, what we didn't). I don't have time to respond to every possible angle raised in this thread, but here are a few quick responses: 1. Roughly 12% of Evernote usage is on web sessions. 2. No one ever said anything about making Evernote a web-only experience. Just because we demo a set of improvements to search on web (which is the least adequate search experience, btw) doesn't mean this is the only thing we are working on. In a series of videos that may well have a lot of episodes by the time we're done (depending on the response we get, I guess), we judged it to be a reasonably approachable initial subject for a first video. Why? It's relatively easy to understand. It's visual. 3. Following up on #2 above, we are NOT planning on eliminating Windows and Mac versions of Evernote with local stores, nor Android and iOS versions with local stores, etc. Being able to use Evernote whether online or offline is a major feature/benefit and in a million years that's not going away. Of course, having a local store would be even better if sync was fully robust. Working on that. 4. Having the kind of interactive search capability we outline here doesn't mean we're taking away your power search capabilities. It means we're trying to find ways to (a) more quickly get to the content you're looking for *without* needing to know quite as much of the search instruction arcana (b) give more people more powerful search tools (c) get there in fewer keystrokes. I'm sure we'll get some things wrong along the way, but we're trying to have our cake (improved UX, improved relevancy, more interactive search tools) and eat it too (powerful command line syntax) on this front. 5. As I said in the first video in this series, some of what we choose to show in this series won't relate to a problem you in particular are facing. Hopefully some of it will. I recognize it's frustrating if the first video we drop doesn't relate to your top pain point, but you can rest assured that there are others amongst our millions of users who do. Otherwise we wouldn't be working on it. We can only do one topic at a time. 6. One of the reasons we prototype a lot of new stuff on the web first is because it's absolutely the fastest way for us to design/test/validate/deploy something new to a limited set of customers in order to get a feedback loop going about a particular design direction. As I said in the very first video, we are trying to test - with users, live in the wild - as much of what we are working on as we can prior to release. If seeing what we're working on in a web setting disturbs you simply because we are showing a concept in a web build, I'm guessing that for your own peace of mind, you should probably stop watching much of the Behind the Scenes series of videos. 7. If you *do* get invited to participate in a Preview release of some kind, as part of that we will point out to you that Preview is definitionally pre-Alpha. Which means more than "it's buggy". It means it's not even close to feature complete. It's not performant. It's so early there isn't a proper name for it. But if there's enough in there for us to get directional feedback early in the process, we will do our best to put it in front of some users, live and in the wild. Because the earlier we get feedback, the better chance we have of being ultimately on target. All we will ask of you is not to pre-judge the eventual release of something by its Preview release, a release that may come months before we lock down direction, functionality or performance. Previews usually come along with non-disclosure requests, too, because they're so early. Which is one reason you (appropriately) don't hear a lot about them. I'll return to lurking now (and get back to my day job, which ultimately is where I have the best chance of generating value for you all). Thanks for watching, and for caring. I recognize that the last part - that you care - comes through in every comment. ian