Why I’m looking to break up with Evernote
I used to love Evernote. But I’m quickly going from their biggest promoter to their biggest detractor. Here’s why:
1 — They deliver loads of new features while ignoring core experience issues
“Remember everything”
“Capture what’s on your mind”
These taglines encapsulate Evernote’s company and product vision: “Capture and remember everything.” To help users “capture everything,” Evernote has launched myriad new features/products: Penultimate, Evernote Web Clipper, a voice recorder, reminders, a smart camera for scanning documents and business cards, an Evernote Moleskin notebook, a PDF annotator, the ScanSnap, Evernote Post-it Notes, the Evernote Jot Script 2 Stylus, … the list goes on.
While an Evernote Moleskin notebook is a creative idea, I reckon that the vast majority of Evernote customers still just want a seamless text-based note taking experience.
And this is where Evernote just plain fails.
I’ve tried to be patient and forgiving for years, but the Evernote note-taking experience on smartphones and computers is overly-complicated and buggy. Here are a few examples of regular, terrible user experience issues:
A) Conflicting changes
Anyone who’s a regular Evernote user has seen this miserable bar in their note:
Following this bar, you’ll find the “conflicting” copy of your note. Sometimes you can get many of these in one note. It’s bad enough that this happens frequently (even when it shouldn’t), but Evernote provides no help for you to know which part of the copy is conflicting. So, if you want to avoid losing valuable content (aren’t you using Evernote to “capture everything?”), it’s up to you to play spot-the-difference for hours with three nearly-identical notes! Fun!
B) Glitch-filled writing experience
Just so many glitches: indents don’t work at times. You can’t change the font size of numbered lists. Weird tables within tables show up. And so much more.
C) Incomprehensible sharing system
Does anyone understand how this works?
D) Clunky composition experience
While Medium, Slack Posts, and even Google Docs have all innovated to make the composition experience more simple, beautiful, and efficient, I find Evernote clunky (e.g., where are the standard headers?).
2—They are incredibly inaccessible
I have 2,277 notes in my Evernote account, and have been an active, paying customer since 2010. But despite this, I have yet to find a way to pierce the Evernote armor and contact an actual Evernote employee directly. Sure, I’ve had gurus on their user forum give me completely unhelpful responses like this response when I complained about the conflicting changes problem:
Oh yeah, it totally makes sense that one of their most frustrating product experiences shouldn’t “necessarily be a high priority for them.” As a longtime loyal customer, I find this impervious relationship frustrating.
3 — They thanked my loyalty with a price increase
I understand that a business needs to grow. They are in it to make money, and I support that. But, in spite of the above issues, Evernote still increased their prices on their paying Premium customers without offering any additional value. In addition to being frustrating, I think this was a poor strategic move because it caused me to reevaluate whether the service is worth it. Were it not for the increase, I would have continued paying them my monthly recurring fee (as I have been for the last 58 months) ad infinitum, blissfully unaware. I imagine this is the case for many long-term Evernote customers.
It seems that this decision was driven more by short-term financial pressure than by a deliberate, wise strategy.
I didn’t write this post to complain about Evernote — although doing so was cathartic. I wrote it because Evernote is a cautionary tale about what can happen when a company loses sight of its product’s essence, uses growth as the excuse for inaccessibility, and leverages valuable loyal customers for short-term business gain.
