Evernote’s Desktop App: Amazing Features Hidden in an Outdated Interface
Though Evernote is an extremely popular note-taking platform, it could make improvements to the desktop app interface.
The general layout of the app is very simple, and subtle visual affordances guides users to begin using the application. Making a new note is very intuitive, with the green dot prompting the user. Furthermore, similar with many apps today, the negative affordance of the un-highlighted tab on unopened notes signifies what can be clicked on.
It is clear that the notes can be clicked on, because of the blue highlighting around the box currently selected. The visual affordance associates blue coloring with things that can be clicked on, a great design choice to help learnability and efficiency.
However, there are features that are not as learnable. The note ‘tagging’ feature does not have sufficient learnability, especially since in the ‘tag’ page of the app, there is no indication of where the tags are placed and what they do, so users would not be able to take advantage of this feature. This decision may be because the tagging feature is intended for simply more efficient note searching, however, I believe tagging can play a larger role in the experience.
The note-taking process also it not efficient in terms of a user’s productivity, since there is no clear way to ‘focus’ on a note. That is, there is no clear way of editing a note without any distractions from the rest of the app. However, from playing around, I found that if a user double clicks on the note, it opens the note in a popup window that mimics a focus mode feature. This feature is incredibly useful, however there is no affordance that suggests a user can double click.
Similarly, the text editing features are equally as hidden, lending itself to poor learnability and memorability. To find a specific text transformation, such as adding bullet points, the user may have to click through several before finding the desired effect. The options are small and hidden on the top, making this feature of the more insignificant and difficult to access. This decision may be because the designers wanted the actual contents of the notes to be the main focus, instead of the tab bar at the top. This relates to existing design patterns in platforms such as Google Drive and Microsoft Word, where the buttons are small and insignificant to avoid distracting from the actual contents of the document.
Lastly, though a major design component of Evernote is the ability to mimic the experience of having notes within notebooks, the notebook page’s layout does not advertise this. Thus, the memorability of the notebook navigation is poor, since there is no visual connection between the notebooks and the display. However, Evernote states it that it was designed to be an “extension of the brain”, which tends to think of items sequentially, instead of in a spread out, horizontal layout, thus the way of displaying the notebooks in the app was purposeful.
To improve the design of tagging feature of the app, adding in textual prompts on the tag page indicating what the purpose is will guide the user to create a new tag. Furthermore, by creating a digital experience of a real life ‘tag’ on a note with the newly created tag will not only make it clear of the purpose of tagging, but improve the learnability and memorability of the feature.
In order to make clear the text editing features, a popup box, upon hovering, over the different text quality buttons would significantly improve the learnability and memorability of the feature. New users would be drawn to the customizability of the note taking experience, and experienced users would appreciate the prompting while navigating as well.
Since it is difficult to signify the user the feature of double clicking the note to initiate a ‘focus’ mode, making the note boxes on the side bar have a shadow effect could make the box seem more three dimensional and expandable. Thus, users would think to double click to expand the box even more, thus initiating the redesigned focus feature, where the surrounding text is blurred.
Finally a redesign of the notebook layout to mimic physical notepads would cause the user to create an association between the notes and the notebooks, making the notebook page more memorable for access in the future. This design will advertise the notebook hierarchy, prompting the user to utilize the efficient features Evernote has.
All in all, I really enjoy Evernote’s note taking concepts, however, a redesign of the desktop app would allow for users to take advantage of the myriad of features it provides.
