Major UX problem: left panel doesn't keep the context

[Kokun 0]

It's the "spring" cleaning time and i've been going through all of my notes, books, and tags organizing everything using the new UI.

One problem that almost renders it unusable is that the left reference panel does not keep context after most actions and scrolls back to the top.  This forces the user to have to scroll down again and again.  This was happening with the list of tags and notes and really should never happen.  When a user scrolls down a long list to a particular place that means that it's important.

If a note is deleted the focus should move not to the top of the list but to the next item in the list.  The list should maintain the user selection context at all times until the user changes it.

 

[hampsterx 6]

yup this is really infuriating, same thing with the reminders, tick "done" and it jumps down.

 

Apologies in advance...

 

<rant>

The usability of the new web UI is a step backwards, it's like nobody on the Evernote team actually eats their own dogfood. The mobile first approach approach just cripples the power users, I would much rather the notes view gave a grid view option so I didn't have have 2/3 of the screen as white space. One other pet peeve, there is a "start a chat" icon on hover over the note, I NEVER use this feature nor intend to, a link to the to the original source would be much more useful.  

 

</rant>

[Glennie 112]

@ Kokun: I reported something similar some time back.

Upload an image and you are taken write to the top of your note, from where you have to scroll down again.

If you are going to add a lot of images this will get very tedious.

 

(There are so many requests for improvements and mentions of bugs on this forum. Isn't it about time we got some feedback on when some of these things might be addressed? People will stop posting if they don't see any response. They will see it as futile. Ideally there should be a published list of confirmed bugs and an indication of the priority given to each.)

[Kokun 0]

I haven't heard anything from Evernote.  I guess they are still trying to figure out how to be responsive to their users.

In the meantime i've switched back to the old UI and it's much better for power users.  I sincerely hope they will not do away with it after the current interface gets out of beta.  Mobile/Occasional users and power users are different audiences with very different needs.  They'll need different interfaces. 

[hampsterx 6]

ok just switched back to the original and the three pane interface is much nicer to work with. Amusingly when I clear a reminder (from note reminder list) it still loses the context but if I do it on the detail page it doesn't.

 

This will do for the interim to retain my sanity but yes I do worry about the future of the web client. Would be better if they exposed their bug tracker publicly or at least provide a restricted view of it so they can link to a ticket from a forum post so people know it's on the back log. Hiring a community manager to help curate the user oriented bug/feature requests and manage the forums etc would be a wise step also if they don't already have someone at least part time allocated to this role.

[hampsterx 6]

ok after perusing the forums last night I see it's a bit more systemic than just the new Web UI.

 

• Is the Evernote forum becoming predominantly a complaints board/ substitute for Evernote support? - Nov 2014
• What is your experience with Evernote Support? - Jan 2015
• Evernote Support, or lack thereof - Feb 2015
• Feature Request -- Common Features across all Platforms - April 2015

• theguardian - Evernote to change premium price as CEO says 'it was the wrong price' - Nov 2014
• techcrunch - Evernote CEO’s Mea Culpa — Plans To Address App Stability, Plus A Hiring Blitz - Jan 2014

 

“We’re about work. Last year we made the decision to really focus on work. We don’t really talk about Evernote [as something] for your hobbies any more,” 

 

I think this is the crux of the problem, they have focused on features at the expense of stability and reducing technical debt and now they are reeling from it so forums and usability issues are probably pretty low on the back log of problems to solve right now. 

[Glennie 112]

Hamsterx, I wanted to ask what you meant by "features".

 

If I understand you correctly you are suggesting that there is a programming backlog which Evernote just does not have the resources to deal with.

[hampsterx 6]

Programming is a bit of a mix between building a house and gardening. It's not a rigid discipline as other engineering, say, building a bridge, whereby you have the blueprints up front from an architect and it's built exactly to spec and everything about it, right down to the strength at various points on the bridge, etc, are precisely known and calculated. Writing code is often a process of discovery and experimentation on the part of the developer from vague or changing specifications and requirements. Management and end users only see the tip of the ice berg (the visible 10%), the other 90% is the design/implementation and all the code to handle the odd edge cases that occur etc. Software Developers are always constrained by time, you almost never write the code perfect first time, usually it's a process of refinement that happens to get the code to as elegant and simple a solution as possible while still managing to meet your timelines. Often times the code or feature goes out the door and is either buggy, flawed (design wise), or convoluted (code is not as clear/simple as it could be), etc. Sometimes it's not until much later (err hindsight) that you realize there are better ways to solve the problem which would streamline/simplify the code and hence reduce complexity. All of this stuff is known as "technical debt", it's like using your credit card to buy something, if you don't pay it off the interest will keep accumulating if you ignore the problem, adding drag to developer productivity, making it harder to implement new features, fix bugs, etc. Even small bits of cruft in the code can cause developers to waste quite a bit of time figuring what it does, next time they come back around and touch some related code.

 

Or to put it in gardening terms, when Management make a decision to focus on features (ie plant more vegetables) at the expense of paying off debt (weeding, making compost, companion planting, etc) on what has already been built then it can very easily become buggy and unstable (eg lower the yield). 

 

Developers need time to "pay off" the technical debt of putting in features (the extra, nice to have stuff management/users want) to avoid spiraling complexity which makes the code complicated to understand. Unfortunately this is the norm in IT, over time what happens is that features become harder and harder to implement to the point that it's actually easier to just rewrite the project from scratch

 

In Evernote's case they have numerous native apps (eg Iphone, Android, Mac, Windows, etc) and the Web Client. They have put in lots of new features over the past 18 months. I suspect this has come at the expense of unifying the applications to use the same code base, which would have been a massive payoff of already existing technical debt, hence every application has slightly different features and behavior. 

 

Here is an example from Google

 

arstechnical - How Google Inbox shares 70% of its code across Android, iOS, and the Web - Nov 2014

 

That sort of approach will enable them to build new features on all platforms much faster and easier than if each project was it's own island unto itself.

 

enjoy, TiM

 

ps as you can probably guess, I write code for a living

[Glennie 112]

Thanks for that brilliant answer.

All makes more sense now.

[Kokun 0]

thanks hampsterx,

 

i'll quote you next time i'm trying to explain to clients why their application is not as polished as they imagined it.

[hampsterx 6]

did a bit more digging last night..

 

This blog post in Jan 2014 (evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant) was picked up by Hacker News (very popular news site for tech people) which resulted in Phil Libin (Evernote CEO) posting a reply post on-software-quality in which he states a big goal for the year of focusing on stability and the core product yada ya. 

 

The general consensus was the following sort of things:

 

- Customer support is terrible

- Lack of transparency with product development (roadmap, bugs, bugs fixed, etc)

- Inconsistent UI across apps, unstable/buggy etc

- Sync is still buggy (slow to sync, data loss, etc)

- General feeling of new features at the expense of stability

 

My favorite comments are:

 

Agreed. Talk is nice but actions speak louder than words. 5 months since the original post and not one hint that support and the quality problems are any better.

 

Difficulty in achieving stability in a code base is often indicative of fundamental issues in the underlying software. In such a case, you often see a ramping-up of good intentions, without any real results. You hear phrases like ” company-wide effort to improve quality”, and so on, but actual quality improvements can prove elusive. Let’s hope that’s not the case here.

 

Well, It’s June and nothing. Just go to the forums and problem after problem after problem. Problems that have been apparent and communicated to Evernote support back in Q3 and Q4 of 2013. Lingering and festering and nothing. Evernote has become all talk and no action.

 

After more than 8 months and patient optimism it is clear that this is merely just empty corporate posturing with no real action or change actually implemented. Words are always easier and if they are peppered with corporate and motivational jargon of the day, so much the better.

.. What we have here is an organization that started out with a focus and a product but within a very short time completely lost its way and focus.

 

 

Talking about New Features:

 

Skitch

 

 I had to go find the original version of skitch, built by a different company, because of how badly the Evernote team massacred it.

 

http://brickybox.com/2013/07/17/scrup-a-better-skitch-replacement

 

A brief history:
* Skitch was great. It was an app for taking screenshots on a mac, editing them (in simple ways like adding text, arrows, cropping etc.), and uploading them to your own web hosting (or the app-supplied hosting, which I think no one ever used). Easily the most useful app I had on my mac. And it was free.
* Evernote bought (or somehow got involved with) Skitch, integrated it with all their other *****, removed most of the useful things from it, and basically destroyed it (this was about a year ago, maybe a bit more).
* Public outcry ensued.
* In an attempt to placate all their existing users, they kept the old version of skitch alive, and even updated it once or twice. Sadly though, it hasn’t been updated in a while, and now it looks like it’s been abandoned.
* Along came OSX 10.9, which looks like it has broken Skitch entirely. Even the recently-updated “Evernote-skitch” is broken.

 

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/80780-is-skitch-dead-layoffs-in-austin/

 

I wish someone from Evernote would comment on the status of Skitch just to let us know if it's alive or dead. Mac and iOS versions are buggy and frustrating to use and the Windows version has had the "aero-snap" bug since 2013. Evernote in general seems to be mismanaged - they don't communicate well, they don't listen to feedback, and they don't honor their commitments (I'm looking at you recurring reminders and enhanced security features). (Feb 2015)

 

Scannable

 

Well, the core OCR/HWR function of Evernote was developed by a different company, in a sense. The company was headed by Pachikov who is a veteran of the HWR field. He is currently retired, to the best of my knowledge. I am not sure, who took the course of codebase/feature sprawl. Retrospectively, that was a bad choice.

 

 

Anyway, back to the core technology side of things

 

http://mashable.com/2013/08/27/evernote-scaling/

 

In putting together the core team, Libin recruited people he had previously worked with

 

These core (very senior, very experienced) engineers are still there actually (I stalked some of them on LinkedIn).

 

Evernote wouldn't have been as set up for success, though, if its development team hadn't focused on cross-platform accessibility early on, determining that it would be advantageous to build a synchronization API first and use that to build interfaces, says Engberg.

 

So yeah, this was basically there strategy, build a syncronization API so that all the platform teams could implement it. The platform teams were then left to run wild and "compete" with each other hence the variation in features/stability etc between clients.

 

One interesting piece of tech one of the senior developers used was the Chromium Embedded Framework (basically Chrome browser inside app) for the note editing on the Windows/Mac clients. This was a good use of cross platform technology.

 

However, unlike what I said in my earlier post, it's simply not very feasible to try and reuse the same code base across various platforms, the technology to do this is still in it's infancy so my earlier post was a bit too simplistic even if it did kind of touch at some of the possible root problems affecting code quality.

 

What I think they should do however is par back the number of supported mobile platforms (now that we know this mobile thing is a two horse race) to just Iphone and Android and maybe a thin (web) client and ensure they are as consistent as possible, and rock solid reliable.

 

On the desktop side they would be probably be better served by building a pure web client (like spotify) that sits inside an application, thereby they would then get down to basically 4 clients (Iphone, Android, Thin Web, Thick Web) which would be much more manageable.

 

However, I think business wise they probably had little choice but to follow the path towards focusing on the Enterprise market given that Microsoft made OneNote free in March last year (Microsoft's OneNote strategy: Battle Evernote, or something bigger?). This reminds me of the browser wars, eg Netscape being crushed due to Microsoft making IE free.

 

So, in conclusion, who knows what the future holds for Evernote..

 

Enjoy, TiM

[Glennie 112]

Fantastic Tim. 

Thanks for that huge effort.

 

I am learning a lot. 

Picture you paint is not encouraging.

I like your 4 client recommendation.

[nanphan 138]

Hello everyone, we are aware of some of the issues with the left panel scrolling incorrectly at times. We will be addressing this issue in a future release. Thank you for your patience. - Nancy 

[nanphan 138]

Hello everyone, 

 

We've made some tweaks to the logic for the left note panel. Can everyone try it out and let us know if this helps mitigate some of the problems mentioned? 

 

Thanks,

 

Nancy