Evernote Web: Pushing “reactive” UIs too far…
Evernote is quickly becoming a sad study in what happens when good intentions (and good design) get drowned into a sea of, honestly, pretty desperate-looking, attempts at growing the user base by appealing to the “cool kids.”
I have been using Evernote for many, many years and found it somewhat useful, but only marginally so: it is a convenient place where to keep notes and maybe stash some useful URLs with my comments, but I rarely use it on my iPhone, and certainly don’t use it daily on my desktop.
The Web UI is unnecessarily clunky, the desktop app is just a thin wrapper around a WebKit window and using it for quick note-taking is unnecessarily cumbersome: if I state that using Apple Notes is a better option, I think I’m giving everyone a measure of how bad it is.
So, that’s why I probably missed the latest iteration until yesterday, when I decided I wanted to update some notes of mine and figured it would have been nice to be able to log in the web app…
Now, let us bear in mind that Evernote key value proposition (and the one they want you to pay them for) is that it is “the one note-taking app to rule them all” and that it should, theoretically, be accessible from any device, anywhere.
Well, no such luck on Chrome on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04):
It turns out that, try as you might, there is no “sign in” or “login” link to be found anywhere — plenty of options to “sign up,” but no way to get back into your account.
Actually the screenshot above does not even show the “menu” drop-down which is visible in the top-right corner of the MacOS screenshot above (you, know, those little horizontal bars that, when clicked, will give the user the illusion of a menu dropping down — come on, you know the one I’m talking about: the one the “cool kids” will pontificate about, when they tell you all about their “mobile first strategy” and their UX prowess) — that one has now disappeared and no way to get it back.
However, even when that was visible, still no “Sign In” option:
So, running out of options, I first tried a few random variations (/login , /signin, etc.) but then I quickly did what any self-respecting, seasoned and deeply technical professional would do… I Googled it :-)
And, in case you are wondering, here is the URL to log back into your Evernote account:
https://www.evernote.com/Login.action(which, incidentally, as endpoints go, is about as bad as it gets… I mean… .action, really? what is this, Internet Explorer, circa 1989?)
Today, however, entirely by chance, I solved the riddle: by making the window larger (I mean, really LARGE — to give an idea, on a 31" 4k monitor, we’re talking around 70% of the width) the navigation links in the top bar (visible in the MacOS screenshot) magically appeared (well, for a while anyway):
Alas, that didn’t last too long: soon they were gone, along with the cool kids’ drop down menu and anything else for that matter…
At which point, mindful of the fact I’ve been benefiting from using Evernote’s free service for many years, I wanted to “give back” by reporting the bug and maybe engage in a useful conversation with their support folks, ideally helping them out to make their product better: I’m a developer myself, and I sure have caused my fair share of bugs (some would quibble on the use of “fair” here — but don’t listen to the haters…).
Double alas — if you are not a “Premium” user, apparently you cannot report a bug (why?) but you’re welcome to access the Forums (why?) or browse the Knowledge base (why?): I’m sure that if this were in the KB, they’d also have fixed it now, wouldn’t they.
But instead of telling you that straight out — Evernote Support thinks it would be fun to have you navigate a (slow-loading) bunch of pages, choose options, do stuff, and generally lead you round in circles until you finally go WTF and (metaphorically) hang up on them.
So, there you have it: instead of a helpful, professional-to-professional conversation, here we are, with me spouting sarcasm and making fun of the Javascript “cool kids”…
However, trying to derive some benefit from this rather unedifying story, let’s figure out a few guidelines, so you won’t end up being another “cool kid” at the receiving end of this admittedly grumpy old dude’s rage:
- always test your UI on major variants of OS and Browser: these days there are pretty much only three OSes (although, many of you Javascript “cool kids” may have never heard of it, yes, Linux is a thing) and three browsers, so it’s not too hard to define a 3x3 matrix and give it some testing love;
- even better, set up an automated testing infrastructure (using Selenium, or whatever is the testing framework du jour for UI/Javascript these days) and, once you’ve done that, go the extra step and have it integrated with a CI/CD (aka, Jenkins) infrastructure (ask the old bearded men at the back of the office who look after the backend, they may be able to help you: yes, I know, they dress unfashionably and are usually grumpy, but hearing that someone in the UI/UX community wants to do CI testing will move them to tears);
- allow your users to report issues — ideally, providing some form of structured questions / reporting, so you can extract as much information around the issue upfront, without too much back and forth: this should be allowed for all your users; you can choose to (obviously!) prioritize the paying/premium tiers, but also the scum at the back on the free tier may have useful feedback from time to time;
- do not assume that your users have infinite patience and time to go round in circles when reporting issues: yes, I agree, some users will waste your time reporting “issues” which, in fact, could be solved by them RTFM, but having people click on a sequence of 10 guided questions, only to lead them to a “Sorry, you cannot file a ticket, but you can visit our Forums” when you already knew the outcome at the beginning (it’s not like a user’s payment tier changed based on which questions you asked) is honestly, infuriating.
Or, of course, you can have them write snarky pieces, borderline politically incorrect, on Medium.
Peace.
