Evernote Calendar Integration

Reducing the friction of creating and retrieving meeting notes by integrating a user’s calendar into Evernote

End to end Evernote calendar integration desktop experience

Evernote is a note taking and productivity app that allows users to capture their content digitally on mobile, desktop, and web whether it’s just a quick note about a thought or idea, a web clipping, an important file, or a scanned document. One of the most common use cases for our professional users, however, is taking meeting notes.

As the sole designer on this project, my role involved looking at the end to end meeting note taking experience and solving note taking problems across the mobile, desktop, and web platforms. Thanks to our unique approach leveraging calendar integration to solve meeting note organization problems, this feature quickly snowballed from side exploratory project into a new paid feature for the product.

Project goal

  • Reduce the friction of the note taking experience for Evernote’s most common professional use case, meetings.

    • Reduce the need to switch between apps

    • Reduce the amount of time it takes to start taking notes

    • Reduce the amount of time it takes to find existing meeting notes

  • Increase app engagement and overall conversions to paid tiers.

Role: Design Lead & Product Designer from start to ship
Team: 1 PM, 7 Engineers, 1 Designer, 2+ QA, 1 PMM, 1 UXR, 1 writer
Partners: Collaborated with 7 product teams & 6 designers across the company
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Web, iOS, & Android
Timeline: June 2020 (Exploratory Phase) - July 2021 (Shipped to Production)

Evernote Blog: Turn Yourself Into a Meetings Mastermind (With a Little Help From Evernote)

“There’s this new Evernote feature that looks at your Google Calendar and when a meeting is about to start, pops up a new note pre-populated with the meeting details, contacts, and Action Items heading + checklist and a Notes heading + bulleted list. It’s so smart and so great.”

— @ramkanda

Viewing event details and available actions

 

Mobile Experience: Tapping on an event brings up a bottom sheet to view event details and options.

Creating a new note

 

Mobile Experience: Tapping on the “Create” button an an event automatically creates a new note linked to the event with event details pre-populated.

Opening a linked note

 

Events that already have notes attached have an “Open” button instead of a “Create” button. The icons are distinctly different to allow users to visually scan for meetings with content. Tapping on the button opens the note.

Opening multiple linked notes

 

Multiple notes can be linked to an event. Tapping on the open icon shows the user the list of all linked notes.

Linking a note while editing the note

 

Tapping on the + icon while in a note allows users to link the current note to an existing event.

Reminder notifications

 

If users have event reminders turned on, they are notified at the specified time to create or open notes linked to their calendar.