Evernote Search

Redesigning an experience millions of users rely on daily

As a part of the 2019 refactoring work at Evernote, I was responsible for one of the most critical projects: redesigning the global search feature into a consistent user experience across clients.

This effort posed significant challenges, as the experiences in legacy clients (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android) had historically been implemented differently, each following their native platform design guidelines. The new design needed to introduce new capabilities while respecting the workflows of tens of millions of active users, driving them to accept significant change voluntarily.

We did not only implement a world-class predictive engine that exposes relevant suggestions before and as the user is typing, but we took the opportunity to fix many customer pain points we had been observing: better discoverability of content, highlighting of matches, filtering flows, tag behavior, advanced syntax, support for Boolean expressions, and radically improved workflows and performance.

The new version of Evernote where this work shipped was the winner of the 2021 People's Voice Webby Award for Work & Productivity Apps and Software.

My responsibilities:

• Defining primary and secondary use cases, developing an experience strategy and product requirements while the team temporarily lacked a product manager.
• Creating proofs of concept and prototypes and working with our user research partner to validate them.
• End-to-end product design of the desktop experience.
• Onboarding a product designer and helping onboarding a product manager into the project.
• Mentoring that new designer and overseeing the completion of mobile designs.
• Developing detailed interaction workflows to effectively communicate the final design solution internally.
• Working with engineers and ensuring the design was implemented according to spec.
• Collaborating with Product Marketing and CSMs, and creating materials and supporting graphics for Help & Learning and Customer Support programs.