Delightful Experiences – Evernote, Conclusion
I’m concluding my exposition of my “delightful experience” with Evernote. Last time, I talked about the UI or the interface and alluded to the notion that this might be odd. So, this time, for the conclusion, I want to talk about the UX principles involved in my delightful experience.
Innovation of Features
No.
Okay, I suppose I should say more. I brought up the three elements of Evernote that lead to a good user experience for me:
- Web Clipping
- Search
- User Interface
None of those “features” are innovative. I was using a web-clipping plugin for Firefox, called Scrapbook, way back in 2004. In fact, when Evernote came along, I wasn’t convinced I needed it because I already had Scrapbook. Search? Duh. Search is not an innovative feature. A UI? Right. Definitely not the first UI ever built and it’s interface isn’t exactly innovative, just elegant.
The delightful user experience of Evernote did not come from a huge set of features. It did not come from feature innovation. There is nothing new or innovative in the features of Evernote.
Innovation of Experience
Evernote delivered on the delightful experience by taking something that was done before, and doing it better, doing it right, making it delightful. Evernote’s Web Clipping is amazing compared to Scrapbook. Evernote’s Search is powerful, fast and delightful to use. Evernote, from the beginning decided to break patterns, and to change the rules on established features. They don’t do things the same way as anyone else. Not in the features they have, but how they built the experience of these features. Even in other features that I haven’t mentioned, like tags, annotations, screen capture, bookmarks, etc., can be found in lots of products. Evernote’s success is based on how they built these features and how they integrated the features together.
Evernote isn’t Perfect
Let me reiterate, Evernote is not Perfect. No software is perfect. Perfect doesn’t exist. I’m okay with that. Users are okay with imperfect. There are lots of things I can complain about in Evernote (that might be a good exercise for later), but Evernote wins because it does something delightful for me and does it more than once. On average, I’m impressed and grateful more than irritated and annoyed.
So, what do you think of Evernote?
Submission Call
If you have software that you find “delightful,” let me know what it is. We can take a look at it together and maybe I can get some UX updates put together for it.