Evernote Tasks

Adding a crucial new feature to Evernote

The ability to manage tasks in Evernote has been one of the primary user requests for many years. I led the team that designed Tasks during 2020 and 2021, from early explorations to shipping it.

We worked closely with our product management and engineering partners to help scope the requirements and defined an approach for designing this feature that prioritized our target user and accommodated a wide variety of use cases, from simple personal to-dos to complex team collaboration workflows. We went through more than 15 rounds of user studies (from generative to usability) and used the feedback from early releases to learn, iterate, identify opportunities, and improve our designs.

The final solution leverages the existing constructs of the product (notes and notebooks) to organize tasks rather than creating a conflicting organization mechanism. Soon into our design iterations, it became evident how tasks and notes made each other more valuable: users like having action items in their notes and having context around their to-dos. This approach made them more efficient - and most importantly, for many of our users that context already exists in Evernote.

To make it easier for users to stay on top of it all, we also created a screen that aggregates tasks from different notes into a view that provides smart prioritization and manual grouping, filtering, and sorting capabilities.

Tasks is arguably the most significant change that Evernote introduced since it launched in 2009. It was also conducive to expanding the product beyond simple note-taking and the company mission from helping users remember everything to also help them achieve what's important.

My responsibilities:

• Managing a distributed design team across three different geographies and time zones.
• Hiring and onboarding two product designers.
• Working with PMs and Engineering leads to break down the project into achievable milestones, prioritizing and planning sprints, and ensuring timely completion of design deliverables so we could work in parallel and move fast.
• Overseeing all stages of the design project, including first launch experience and monetization flows.
• Facilitating design reviews and cross-functional sync meetings to keep stakeholders aligned, collect feedback, and ensure the viability of the work.
• Helping partners examine and solve complex design problems related to time zone management, user permissions, task assignment and recurrence. Ensuring the right process, data, and user research findings were considered.
• Collaborating with Product Marketing and Customer Support partners on Go-To-Market, communications and support programs.