5 Insider Hacks from the NoteLedge Team
It takes more than creativity and technical skills to build an app. Experimentation, communication, and teamwork are key to keeping the project up and running. For our NoteLedge team, the best way to refine a product is to put ourselves in the users’ shoes and use it in our daily workflow.
Today we’re sharing some insider hacks. Read on and learn how our staff use NoteLedge to generate ideas, facilitate communication, and deliver a better user experience. You just might discover useful tips you’ve never thought of before.
Hack #1: Research and Generate Ideas
- Chris Su / Project Manager
As the project leader and the mastermind behind app development, Chris uses NoteLedge to collect information from web sources, as well as generate new ideas. The drag and drop feature allows him to quickly gather information from Pinterest and his designer favorite sources such as designboom or Creative Applications Network. The canvas-like workspace is ideal for sketching, writing, and adding audio notes with referencing materials. When an idea is born, Chris can easily share the concept and UX wireframe with team members.
Hack #2: Get Hands-on with Smart Gestures
- Hsiaowen Wu / UX Designer
Studying the latest design trend is an essential part of Hsiaowen’s job as the interaction/user experience (UX) designer. Her favorite tip is to watch videos in a floating window and take notes at the same time. This allows her to flip pages while the video is playing on the top, and comprehend more information with all the reference materials and note-taking tools. This is particularly useful when she’s doing UX research from web sources like UX Matters or UX Booth.
Hsiaowen also applied intuitive iOS gestures to NoteLedge for better user experience. Try these out!
- Double tap on a note cover to quickly access the note content.
- Swipe up from page preview thumbnails to present slideshows.
- Two-finger pinch on the page to zoom in and out. Then double tap to return to 100% view.
Hack #3: Communicate with Visual Aids
- Ting-yi Chen / Graphic Designer
Ting-yi finds NoteLedge particularly useful for illustrating ideas and creating storyboards for video shooting. Adding pictures of potential characters, reference videos and background music helps her visualize the scenes and create a content-rich storyboard. So she could easily discuss the script with the director and communicate with the production team while reviewing all the materials needed. This is something you cannot do with a traditional pen and paper storyboard.
Ting-yi also shares a very useful sketching tip: Write or draw the outline with fountain pen, and then color with the marker. Since the marker drawing is defaulted as the bottom layer, you get to overlap handwritings or sketches above the marker’s background color.
Hack #4: Digest Technical Documents Efficiently
- Zhixun Liu/ iOS Software Developer
As the iOS software developer, Zhixun’s top priority is to keep up-to-date with iOS releases and make sure the app performance is at its best. To digest piles of technical documents and ever-updating tech news, Zhixun has a systematic way to organize information by clipping the highlighted contents from PDF documents and gathering key information from web pages.
Zhixun only keeps essential information in his notes. When he needs more details for coding, he can trace back to the original document and web sources. This allows him to avoid information overload, and significantly reduces the time searching for information through loads of web pages and tech documents. By syncing the documents to cloud storage, it’s easy for him to access the documents at work across all devices.
Hack #5: Record Import Information from Meetings
- Emily Lin / Marketing Manager
NoteLedge is a big help when attending tons of marketing meetings and seminars on a regular basis. To save time taking notes from the slideshow, you can take pictures of the slides or record audio notes to preserve important messages. Write down takeaways from the speaker, and highlight what matters on the slideshow. Concentrate only on the real deal and save the hassles transcribing notes from slideshows or whiteboards. After the meetings or seminars, you can export the notes as PDFs and share the knowledge with your team.
Bonus Hack: Follow Us for More Perks!
We constantly share what we love about NoteLedge and and tips on boosting productivity. So follow us and stay up-to-date with the new features, tips, and special offers.
Speaking of special offers, right now you can get an extended 30-day free trial for any Creativity 365 subscription. Experience all the premium features mentioned above FREE for a month. Go to the Kdan Creative Store and use the coupon code NEWYOU30FREE at checkout to get started. The offer is valid until 1/31/2018.
What do you want to learn about NoteLedge? Do you have any hacks that you want to share with the NoteLedge family? Leave a comment here and let us know!
Last but not least, here’s a sneak peek of the new zoom-in writing feature. Stay tuned!
Originally published at Kdan Mobile Blog.
