Overview:
When I joined school, I bought a few notebooks to pen down notes during the class. It didn’t take me long to realize that the quantity and diversity of information from lectures was so vast that managing it with physical notebooks was very challenging. Besides, I felt I needed a more powerful personal note taking software that let me search my notes quickly with keywords, sort notes chronologically, categorize notes related to a certain topic, include links/photos/files/web references within the notes, replicate notes easily and share notes with others, create reminders and to-do lists; things that physical notebooks aren’t very efficient at doing. In the following sections, I will talk about my instance of “Evernote” software as a personal note-taking tool, which I use to create, organize and retrieve notes and is an elegant solution to all my needs mentioned above.
What resources are being used?
The primary resource that my note-taking software would organize is a note. Each note can be composed of text, images, links, documents, drawings, audio and video files. The first design decision involved taking scope and scale of the software into consideration. I make notes for ten classes/week and ~4 months every semester for 2 years. Each course needs one notebook each. My notes mostly contain text that I create during my classes, with occasional links, drawings, photos, videos and other file attachments. Sometimes when I quickly need to refer to a note and cant recall where it is, I need to be able to retrieve the note based on a keyword or non-textual content like images, attachments and audio present inside it. Sometimes, I need to be able to reference one lecture’s notes to another lecture’s notes if they are similar. With my instance of Evernote, low data volume such as mine is efficiently handled in terms of memory and processing capabilities of my laptop. (As opposed to Corporates having high volumes with 100s of documents being generated and stored every day). I can create virtual notebooks for each course and can keep adding notes under them for every lecture. I use tags to categorize notes related to the same topic so that I can cross-reference them at a later point. The advanced search field fulfills my above mentioned search need by allowing search all notebooks or one particular notebook for textual, non-textual information and tags. Allowing me to safely backup my notes in html/Evernote xml formats is another feature that my note-taking software gives me. This will also allow interoperability with other software systems that support these formats in case I want to port my notes to a different note-taking ecosystem.
Why are the resources organized?
My note-taking software allows additional interactions besides note creation and archiving. It gives me flexibility to delete notebooks and notes, make copies of notes and enable others to access them. Alternately I would want to sort notes chronologically, size-wize or alphabetically. For the above interactions it’s important for the software to store resource description like the author, date of creation and last update, notebook name, size, associated tags, reminders, attachments, and geo information and revision history. The decision regarding what resource description is useful and what is not is guided by what interactions the software supports. Decision about what interactions are to be supported is determined by the scope of the software which in-turn is guided by decisions regarding storage size, number of users, number of resources the system can hold, how many attachments can each note hold and their size, whether notes can be shared with public or private individuals, whether geo-tagging is allowed, how many tags can be created per note, whether notes can be converted to other formats for interoperability and portability, what granularity of resource description is used most often to search for notes. (Eg. The decision to provide search feature by keywords/title/tags/attachments/creation date is more sensible than having to search by note size or number of attachments in a note.)
How much are the resources organized?
My system supports categorization for enable better browsing and searching with the help of “notebooks” and “tags”. It is important to use controlled vocabulary while tagging especially while sharing notes with a lot of people with write-access to the notes. By setting boundaries on who is allowed to tag the shared notes and whether they can create their own tags or forced to use existing tags is a tradeoff for the designers of this system.
Also, decision regarding what file format can you export Evernote resources (notebooks and notes) determines the extent of interoperability of notes created my Evernote system. Exporting resources as simple text/xml/html makes them more interoperable with other systems but might result in information loss (attachments images, drawings, reminders etc). Exporting as Evernote xml format (.enex) might keep all notes intact. However that might make it less interoperable with other systems. Supporting multiple export formats might be a good way to satisfy varied requirements.
When are the resources organized?
Notebooks have been created at the beginning of the semester and notes are added it to during each class. Typically, tags are created after notes are created depending on the topic the note refers to. Also, the resource description is automatically created computationally by the software as and when resources are created, updated or deleted. Additionally, copies of resources created offline exist on the local hard disk and are organized on the server cloud space once online.
Who does the organizing?
As an end-user I’m responsible for creation and physical organization of resources in my note-taking software. Taking into considerations the flexibility and limitation of the software, I decide whether to create different notes for different lectures or one note with multiple lecture’s notes. Also, depending on the cloud space available I can decide whether to attach external resources like pdfs into the system or store them as hyperlinks. Resource description activities like tagging, adding geo-location, and adding author is manually done by me. Rest of the metadata like creation and updation date, calculation of size etc is done computationally. The interaction of saving resources is done automatically by the system within the first few seconds of creation of resources. This prevents loss of information when I forget to save them explicitly.
Other considerations
Evernote is a good attempt at providing collaboration, availability, consistency, information hierarchy, it still falls short when it comes to computing ability in terms of memory and processing power and information formatting capabilities. Dropbox, Google drive, MS Skydrive, MS Office Suite, and Blogs are some of the other alternatives.
One interesting consideration here is the philosophy of centralization vs. diversification. Let me elaborate this with an example. Instagram for example accomplishes a single objective, i.e sharing of enhanced photos, and has captured the imagination of 1billion+ users. The popularity is surprising because more powerful applications like facebook and twitter can also do the same, which suggests that people applications solving specialized needs, over integrated products. To overcome this challenge, Evernote will have to think of ways and means to minimize the learning curve for users. And, product simplicity and design elegance should be its top priorities.