I will give priority to impression notes, citing knowledge notes, Pocket and the newly emerging interest cloud bookmarks in China as its competing products. These three products are chosen as their competing products because they are similar to Evernote in this field, but they have their own characteristics. Although reading and reading daily newspapers have similar collection functions, they can't be regarded as their competing products in terms of mode, so they are not analyzed as the main competing products in this paper. If we only look at the standards such as the number of users and activity, we may not need to add this analysis to the collection of interest and reading, but from the product itself, I think it has its reference significance. Whether it can succeed in the market depends on the nature of their respective teams.
Evernote is a note-taking application, which records everything you want to write down in your life by handwriting or direct collection.
Official version:
In the continuous product iteration, Evernote extends the usage scenario to the concept of "personal workspace":
Products such as Evernote play two basic roles:
(1) undertakes the external memory function:
With the appearance of printing, the amount of information began to increase, and people began to rely on external memory to record the information they came into contact with. The appearance of the Internet, like the node of the printing era, has accelerated the speed and efficiency of information circulation, but it has also greatly increased the amount of information that can be circulated. Therefore, Evernote plays a role in keeping this information and helping people remember the information they need.
(2) assume the role of information management:
Products such as Evernote enable us to store our thoughts (compared with previous paper writing, using Evernote is more efficient, and it can be obtained as long as it can be networked, which greatly improves the efficiency), and also allows users to classify, tag and search in depth this information, which optimizes the efficiency and experience of information management.
So, in combination with the above points, let's lock the characteristics of the target users and their usage scenarios:
These can be summarized as: users with strong content directivity.
Evernote also derives several possible target users from its scenario:
Core requirements:
Secondary demand:
Reflective products, like memory, need to work hard on information coding and extraction to improve memory efficiency and speed up extraction.
Through this part, I hope to determine the functional priority of such applications and the product logic chain built around this priority positioning.
Evernote includes a main scene and several derivative scenes:
The main scene is a record of information that users are interested in and want to remember (or at least find).
The scenarios drawn from its product positioning, functional structure and user base are as follows:
Of these three scenarios, the first two are not analyzed in detail for the time being, and the functions of "list" and "reminder" can only be regarded as auxiliary functions, which are not helpful to user growth or income growth; Teamwork mainly aimed at enterprise users has indeed brought considerable user and revenue growth to Evernote, so it will be briefly analyzed in the following article.
The value starting point of applications such as Evernote lies in the generation and accumulation of content, which comes from two aspects: one is the user's own writing, and the other is the interception from other channels (such as web pages or other apps).
For my own writing, I mainly analyze two aspects, one is the type of notes, and the other is my writing experience.
Evernote provides five types of notes to choose from, which are listed on the home page:
And three "add comments" entries:
① Select one of the five types of comments on the homepage and enter it accordingly.
② From the comments list, click the+sign at the bottom to enter.
However, there are only three types of notes to choose from.
Perhaps these three categories are the main needs of users who know about impression notes, and the subdivision into five categories on the home page is to let users write the type of notes they want at the fastest speed on the home page.
(3) On the Remarks page, click the "+"at the top right to enter.
"Add" here is a general part-of-speech addition. In the part-of-speech addition, you can add any kind of note content through the bottom toolbar.
The writing tools provided by Evernote are still very diverse:
Users can add pictures, recordings, lists, lists, and various operations on text formats.
Among the two competing products I chose, Pocket and Fun Cloud Bookmark are both content collection applications, and they don't have the function of writing notes independently, so I cited "taking notes for knowing" as a competing product to analyze their independent writing functionality.
Except for adding pictures, recordings, lists, lists, reminders, and various operations on text formats, neither of them can add videos. Different from Evernote, when adding notes, users will be provided with 10 templates to choose from:
Only ordinary notes and Markdown notes are free templates, and others need to be paid or upgraded to VIP.
More templates guide users to discover more touching writing scenes and provide the most suitable and convenient typesetting methods.
Pockets are an exception. It won't cut and hide the video by itself, but it can switch to the web version view to watch the video.
Note here: Evernote can also cut and save pdf files, but the effect is that there is a link on the text page pointing to that pdf file, so the effect is still relatively poor, so I won't include it in the table.
For the way of intercepting content from other channels, the interaction between impression notes and knowledge notes is similar:
A long time ago, the version of Evernote could not add tags when intercepting content. Later, when collecting content, you can collect an article from two dimensions: folder and tag. In order to know that notes can only be collected in one folder, but the folder directory can be subdivided into multi-level subdirectories, and evernote can only go to the second-level subdirectories at most.
Pocket and Ququ interact in a similar way when cutting and storing content, but they are completely different from Evernote:
Both of them can be further marked by clicking the "Add Label" button when the saved pop-up window appears, which is convenient for future search. This is also related to the positioning of the product itself. Impression notes and knowledge notes focus on content generation and accumulation, while pockets and interest collections focus on post-reading, so labels are more about giving users content tips and enhancing traceability, while folders tend to be classified and aggregated.
However, when cutting and saving, you need to load all the pictures in the webpage first, and then cut and save them, otherwise you still can't display the pictures in Evernote. Pocket sometimes ignores pictures unless you switch to Web view; For the sake of knowledge and interest, the content of web pages is directly embedded in their own applications, and the reading effect is the best.
However, when cutting and storing contents directly from the APP, the cutting and storing effect of impression notes and knowledge notes is very poor, so they can't be read normally and can only be cut and stored in web pages; The pocket clipping effect is slightly better, but it will miss the picture, and the visual design is simpler, more like the effect in the browser reading view; The effect of collecting interest is the best, and there is generally no problem.
There are usually two ways to find specific content, one is to search layer by layer through information structure, and the other is to search by keywords.
On the homepage of Evernote, users can find the notes they want through shortcuts, notes, notebooks and labels. Shortcuts provide users with the fastest search channel, but they are only a few articles specially collected by users, with the purpose of facilitating re-entry.
Evernote has a shallow level and only supports two layers of folders, and the labels are independent of each other. However, the information structure of evernote can be made extremely deep, because it is a multi-level folder with multi-level labels and a tree structure.
I think if it is too narrow and deep for mobile notebook applications, it is not easy to operate whether to select the corresponding folder when cutting the stored content or to search from the folder and tag list when searching the content. In particular, if the tag list is made into a tree structure, it will be exhaustive and independent, but it is very reasonable to keep this structure for folders, because usually an article only corresponds to one folder, which will not lead to overlap, but an article usually adds multiple tags, so it will inevitably lead to cross-set selection of tags, which will only increase the operating cost of selection in vain.
The label function of evernote is an assistant to the folder function to some extent, which is easier to find after label division and avoids deep hierarchical relationship.
Pocket and fun have no folder function, only labels. As mentioned earlier, this is also in line with the product concept to be read later.
I think keyword search is a very important function of this kind of application, because it determines how quickly you can find what you are looking for. Just like memory, how many things can be written down is only one aspect of memory, and how quickly it can be extracted is generally the key to assessing the level of memory.
Evernote does not support only searching whether the title contains this keyword, which leads to many articles being included in the search results just because this keyword is mentioned. Most of the time, those keywords appear in the "related recommendation" at the end of the article, not in the body, which leads to many irrelevant items, so only the search title can help screen out a group of articles with the highest relevance, which is very useful after accumulating a certain amount of notes. In other words, this is also reducing the search cost of users.
The image search function has always been a function that Evernote is proud of. I think its most practical place is when searching after collecting industry research reports. Because these reports are all pictures stored from web pages, image search is very practical, but it is not so obvious in other scenarios.
I think it is a very important function point to highlight keywords in search results. Evernote not only highlights, but also automatically jumps to the corresponding position after clicking the article, which can help users to know what they want to know as quickly as possible without reading the full text of the article.
There is another way to search in the bookmark of Fun Cloud, that is, to search by the source of the article. In its drawer navigation, there is a "source", which is used to display the access mode of the user's favorite content and the content under the corresponding channel:
If the user still remembers the source of the article, it will get twice the result with half the effort through the source search.
As mentioned above, the content of evernote comes from two aspects, among which the information intercepted from other channels must be the information that users think is meaningful to keep, so it is very normal and logical to mark or annotate some of them after reading.
Evernote has a format brush that provides highlighted text in the text formatting toolbar, but it seems that you can't choose a color, but you can also use it smoothly; Users can also change the text color or underline, etc. However, there is no tool or special format for adding comments in Evernote, which makes users need to design a format to add comments when editing cut articles. I think this is a disadvantage, because it increases the editing cost of users.
Because notes and Pocket can't do anything about the cut content.
In contrast, the function of receiving interest is very friendly in this respect:
Although you can't change the color or add underline, you can easily highlight the text you want to edit, and even add corresponding annotation content, which is a bit like reading more in interaction, which is more in line with the habit of reading text on the mobile terminal. I think this is also a functional improvement that Evernote can learn from in content processing.
First, the revenue source of Evernote mainly comes from paying users. Among its nearly 200 million users, less than half are paying users, and 20,000 companies are using the enterprise edition.
Two. For paying users, Evernote adopts the standard way that basic functions are paid and advanced functions are free. However, in its basic function, the storage of the most basic content is limited. Free users only have 60M storage capacity per month, standard users 1G and advanced users 10G, which is exactly the most important function of Evernote. As for the two advanced functions of "one-click presentation notes" and "smart card scanning" among advanced users, I think "marking PDF documents" is not easy to use on the mobile side, and "recommending related content" is a dispensable function because the increment is extremely limited for the user experience. So in fact, there is only one reason for users to pay: there is not enough storage space. I believe that if there is an application, the function is as good as Evernote, but the storage space is infinite, users will definitely move there. At this time, the reason why Evernote keeps users is probably the migration cost and differentiated functions.
Three. The management has successively introduced functions such as "Evernote Food", "Evernote Peek" and "Evernote Hello", and the feedback from users is extremely poor. The product's iterative direction display priority is unclear, which leads to inaccurate product positioning and inability to focus functions;
Four. The product of "Evernote Food" really conforms to the user's usage scenario, but the market it cuts into is not a market that needs strong interaction; The functions such as "Evernote Peek" and "Evernote Hello" are obviously for the function of "group chat", and this function is mainly set for enterprise users, so it can be seen that Evernote (or Evernote) focuses on enterprise users because they are the main profit source of the company, but this makes the function unable to meet the needs of ordinary users and causes the loss of users. However, among the less than 200 million users of Evernote, there are only about 20,000 enterprise users. For enterprise users, team collaboration software should be more suitable for work scenes than Evernote, so for enterprises, this migration cost is not high, but it can further improve efficiency. Therefore, Evernote should not focus on enterprise users strategically, and ordinary users have higher demand for it than enterprises.
Product iteration must revolve around three directions:
① Solve users' problems.
② Reduce the cost of solving problems.
③ Improve the user experience.
So as to achieve three objectives:
① Increase the number of new users.
② Improve the retention rate.
③ Improve product activity.
As mentioned above, the priority of this kind of products is first locked in the generation and management of content, and the most important thing to improve the user experience is to do the basic functions involved in external storage and information management. For example, give priority to solving the areas that need improvement mentioned in the first part:
① Provide callable templates to improve the efficiency of writing notes.
② Improve the writing experience of the mobile terminal by combining the input characteristics of the mobile terminal.
(3) Allow video cutting.
④ Optimize the function of cutting and storing the contents of other APP terminals.
⑤ Optimize keyword search and increase the search method of searching only keywords in the title.
⑥ Optimize the operation experience when editing articles, such as reducing the operation cost when users highlight text and add comments.
⑦ Optimize the reading experience. The content typesetting of Evernote cut and saved from different websites is different. Some will block the text content because of the floating toolbar, and some fonts are particularly large after cutting and saving, which makes it impossible to read normally. It is difficult to switch to the source webpage for reading on the mobile terminal, which often causes a lot of inconvenience. Gathering fun optimizes the reading experience of thousands of commonly used websites or apps. It is very important for a content-based app to have a uniform format and neat layout when reading in bookmarks that collect interesting clouds.
The user's own notes only take up a small piece of the scene used by Evernote. Another major scenario is cutting and storing high-quality content from various channels. The so-called "high quality" refers to the content that users are interested in and think is worth collecting. Therefore, the premise of Evernote's maximum function is to get enough content that users want to collect, which is also the beginning of this usage scenario. Therefore, helping users find information that they are interested in but lack ways to find it can make users' needs meet beyond expectations.
Zhihu and more users will definitely feel this way. It is easy to agree or praise, but collecting an answer or an article is a relatively low-frequency behavior.
Based on the functional structure and strategic development direction of evernote, we can expand the scene of content sharing, that is, everyone is regarded as an information node, and the content generated or collected by everyone has sharing value, so when users share in a community, this originally weak interactive personal collection behavior becomes a strong interactive sharing behavior, which also makes the original low-frequency demand become a high-frequency demand. At the same time, due to the community's own attributes,
A similar example is the "Reading Daily" launched by Zhihu. Although Zhihu itself is a knowledge sharing community, the threshold is high, and daily reading is to make everyone become a node of information dissemination, recommend what they think is valuable, lower the threshold of content production and improve user activity (although the number of users is not much); Flipboard's user-generated magazine sharing function also has this meaning, but due to its product attributes, this sharing function is not very brilliant. Here, this functional design is purely based on the logic of the product, but these two examples also tell us that a better product is not necessarily more successful.
In this regard, Pocket and Fun Cloud bookmarks have the function of community sharing:
Pocket has created a special section where people you care about can share these contents. Users can get information through system recommendation, address book, Twitter and friends on Facebook.
And you can save the content you are interested in into your pocket or share it with others (but all functions except "Save" are folded in "……", perhaps for fear that the area is too small to cause delay):
The interest sharing system is much more open:
1. Active sharing:
Users can share an article to WeChat friends, friends circle, QQ friends, QQ space, Weibo, kindle and so on. They can see how the articles they share are read by other users.
Jiqu also links the sharing function with the integral system. After sharing their own collections, the more readers, the more points users get, and they can withdraw cash or buy goods at the exchange rate of 1 fun coins = 0.0 1.
2. Check the sharing of other users:
Unlike Pocket, Buqu has not established its own content sharing community, but is connected with other feeds, so you can switch between "My Favorites" and "Hot Favorites" on the homepage:
Although the contents in "Popular Collections" are messy, they also provide users with various types of popular contents. However, it is not a good way to recommend high-quality content to users because the contents collected by more than 30 people will be included in the "Popular Collections" list, so it is not filtered according to users' personal preferences, and the possibility of hitting articles that users like is low.
Perhaps to make up for this drawback, interested users can also get high-quality content through the "view source" function mentioned above. Here, you can not only view your own collections under different websites or APP sources, but also see the collections of other users under this source.
Getting high-quality content through independent feeds is not as direct as Pocket, but because the product positioning and content orientation of each feed are different, users can choose the corresponding feed according to the content direction they want to find. For example, they will never go to Zhihu to find entertainment content worth collecting, and they will never go to 36Kr to find sports reports worth collecting. After locking the direction of the content that users want to search, the probability that users' preferences overlap in a single direction will be much greater, so the possibility of obtaining high-quality content will increase.