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Evernote - A Detailed Case Study

Dharun Kumar February 05, 2022

 An Introduction:

Evernote - An extension of your brain. 


It is an app designed for note taking, organizing, task management, and archiving. The app allows users to create notes, which can be text, drawings, photographs, audio, or saved web content. Notes are stored in notebooks and can be tagged, annotated, edited, searched, given attachments, and exported.

Evernote is cross-platform, for Android, iOS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. It is free to use with monthly usage limits, and offers paid plans for expanded or lifted limits.

My Experience with the product:

Finding an apt app or platform for notes taking, task management is a tedious trial and error process. However, Evernote suits me well after using many different apps (don't want to name those)

I've been using the free version of Evernote for a while. I love the app UI, all in one place feature (Notes, Tasks, Calendar). The most key useful feature for me is sync between platforms.

I usually take notes, take pictures on mobile, write / compile as a document on my laptop. Moreover, I've been utilizing my travel time in the app (Spotify would be playing my favorite tracks randomly in the background).

To conclude, Evernote is perfect fit for my personal use (blogging, notes taking, track personal tasks) and sometimes professionally (taking meeting minutes & share with my colleague).

Thanks Mr. Ian Small, The current CEO and team for the great product.

Objective:

The objective of this case study is to identify how Evernote evolves as a top product in its segment, identify current key customer pain points and suggest solutions for the same supported by analyzed data.


Features:


Pricing & Plans:

Here is the quick summary of three different plans - FREE, PERSONAL & PROFESSSIONAL and its pricing:


For more details - visit here.

In contrast with immediate competitors:

I'm not going to do a competitors' comparison as it is not an intention of this study. However, it's interesting to observe how Evernote stands along with its rivals.


Discussion:
  1. Love the notebook stack feature which enables the user to group notebook of same theme together.
  2. Here is the geographical analysis (Source: Similarweb site):

Engagement across the world & India:

  • App store review 4.3 out of 5 (2.6K ratings)
  • Google Play store rating 4.4 out of 5 (1,668,944 ratings)
(why I'm sharing these stats, I don't know 😁)

User Pain Points:
  1. Free version could have more features. In other words, all the best features are reserved for the premium users.
  2. Speed issue, Lagging, Crashes - Multiple times (Source: Google play store user reviews)
  3. SSL error - Multiple times (Source: Google play store user reviews)
  4. Couldn't able to organize notes, especially for writers / bloggers who are storing n number of notes. Unable to find the notebook stack (Source: Apple app store)
  5. The new UI (version 10.30.6) is not simple and user friendly as before
Solutions and how it improves the product growth?

Solution 1: Allow free users to have access home page customization, set task due date and reminder features. I understand limiting better features from free users urge them to upgrade their subscription, still I believe some additional basic features to free users would increase the user base.

Solution 2: Technical fix 1 to solve app slowness, lags & crash.

Solution 3: SSL stands for ‘Secure Socket Layer', a protocol that establishes a secure connection between two parties—client and server. Technical fix 2 to resolve the SSL error

Solution 4: From the user analysis done by Profit well, the maximum amount of users wants their notes, to do list, tasks to be organized. Hence, technical fix 3 which enables the users to organize their notes, notebooks, notebook stacks better.

Solution 5: The interface of version 10 series seems to be not liked by many users.

  • Suggestions to upgrade UI:
    • Preview notes while hovering over the notes tab. The current design is as below:

Instead, the preview of the respective notes while hovering over might help.
  • New users finding difficult to locate the option like 'Insert image' etc., they'll used to it as they work along. I understand that those options are scattered all over the bar in the previous version. Maybe, a simple 'Insert' text near the plus symbol help?
Note: 'Technical fixes' will not be discussed in detail in this study since it is not an objective of this study. We'll assume that the fixes would solve the user pain points effectively.

Feature prioritization:


Conclusion:

To conclude this study, it is recommended to attack the feature as per the above result to improve / upgrade the product better.

As we discussed, no app is perfect for everyone. Every platform has its own pros and cons. However, Evernote still stands out from its competitors.

Recommendations:
  • From the geographical graph, it is clear that the product usage is largely spread over US market. In other ways, which means there are still lot of opportunities exist to scale on other fast growing countries like India (where the average age is 28.4).
  • A good read here.
References:


✅ Disclaimer: This analysis owned by me and this is not a promotional content. This analysis has been done only for study purpose to leverage my tech product skills. ✅
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