Some note taking apps have made me feel this way

Opinionated Design in Note Taking Apps

The story of how I stopped using Evernote

The note taking apps I have used: Evernote, OneNote, Bear, Notion, Google Keep, DropBox Paper, IA writer, Apple Notes

I have used close to a dozen note taking apps in the last 4 years. Starting from OneNote (I was one of the few proud owners of a Nokia Lumia) to the ubiquitous yet clueless Evernote (more on that later), and more recently I’ve found a home for my ideas in Notion.

I primarily write notes for two purposes:

1. Checklists — Work, grocery, bill payments, reading lists, movie lists
2. Long form entries — A daily 200–300 word journal, practising the Feynman technique, collection of bookmarks, articles and web-clips on topics I follow.

I have been able to achieve partial success doing (1) and (2), and overall Ive had ambivalent thoughts about note taking apps. A few thoughts:

• I’ve come to feel that for a note taking app to be useful in long form entries, it needs to have the least number of baked-in-decisions — Decisions made on behalf of the user by the people making the product.
• When building an opinionated product with baked in decisions, it is extremely important to know who you are building for. Most note taking apps have not got this right. In fact it is extremely hard to get this right because note taking apps are used by a wide multitude of people for different purposes — Designers, writers, engineers, managers
• Note taking apps like Evernote, Apple Notes and OneNote have build in the wrong signals and decisions. The structure they have built is not too different from that of my documents folder. This just makes them a faster horse with better paint work.

A Faster Folder with word docs?

• There are opinionated note taking apps that Ive come to love as well — Google Keep and DropBox Paper.
• Google Keep signals that it is to be used for your daily notes, reminders and all kinds of checklist.
• DropBox paper, with its minimal UI, readable fonts inspires/signals me to write long form . While I understand Paper was built as a competitor to Google docs and as a collaborative tool, it sells short on this promise because of the baked in decision to structure everything into folders.
• Evernote is an opinionated app that has baked-in all the wrong decisions — Its not easy to use to make checklists because creating a checklist takes way more than 3 clicks and retrievability is hard. The reading experience when it comes to a note that has 200–300 words is made bad by a cluttered UI.
• Over the last couple of months, Ive been on and off using Notion. It seems like Ive found the right kind of product for me.
• Notion is a rare blip where there is just the right amount of baked-in-decisions. Using Notion feels like using a better notebook, a well designed doc and a lighter to-do list.
• The open layout gives me the flexibility to design my notebook and navigation the way I like. More importantly, Notion makes me feel like going back to the long form notes I have made to rediscover old ideas and fall upon new ones serendipitously.

My personal page on Notion

• Although I use Notion for personal note taking and writing, the real value of Notion lies outside this, when used by a team. Notion has the ability to replace the likes of Basecamp, Trello. The current experience of of working in a team is fragmented.
• Bear is another app where I have found the writing and reading experience to be fluid. It also strips away a lot of the feature bloat that Evernote is suffering from, but again Bear falls into the same trap of putting notes in silos.
• If you want the good parts of Evernote, Bear is the way to go. If you want to feel what the future of having all your work and ideas in one place looks like, you should give Notion a try

P.S — This article was inspired partly by RibbonFarm’s brilliant newsletter on Politically opinionated design