The background

It’s fair to say that the note-taking Evernote app has been through the mill in recent times. The company carried out a rebrand in August 2018 in an attempt to refocus itself as a service and a new CEO, Ian Small, who took the hot seat in October, has publicly acknowledged the issues he needs to address this year to get things back on track — and not just from a UX and UI design perspective.

“We exist to help you focus on what matters most,” Small’s predecessor, Chris O’Neill, insisted only weeks prior after the rebrand, illustrating that the productivity app certainly wasn’t helping people focus on what matters most.

These public statements were indicative of the struggles Evernote was going through as a brand and this came to light when it had to let 15% of its workforce go and lost some top executives, too.

However, the rebrand and the new chief seem to have displayed a bit of a positive change of direction, so let’s see how it stacks up — is it still worth including in your working arsenal of tools and services or is it just a waste of time?

Does it work for its audience?

Overall reviews for the Evernote app are on the positive side in the most part — we all know they’ve been ticking the right boxes for at least some people with certain features, so expectations remain high for new users.

The whole concept is based on saving time and being productive, so it helps that the initial splash screen is clear and simple and that it’s only a matter of entering your email address to sign up. First impressions are dashed, though, when you’re asked to sign up for a Premium account there and then, which just seems daft to me. Granted, it includes a free trial, but I haven’t even had chance to use the app by this point, so it seems far too early to be asking for commitment if you’re trying to win over a new audience.

The problem is that it does a little too much and it’s difficult to get the full picture

Once you get past the initial access, the onboarding for new users is straightforward and useful with its (skippable) tutorial. It’s easy to see how useful Evernote can be from this, so you can understand why it works for so many people, but the problem is that it does a bit too much and it’s difficult to get the full picture.

It might have been a better approach for the onboarding process to ask users what they want to get out of the app and what they want to achieve with it, a bit like Headspace does — this way, you’re comfortable as a new user that it’s going to work for you because you’ve got precisely the features you need and you know where to find them.