Filed: Investigate Evernote Web Clipper

[ianb]

The Web Clipper tool has a bunch of similarities.

[ianb]

Some notes from a first interview with someone who uses it:

• Acts as a bookmark tool, a lot of things get saved speculatively, even if she never goes back to them. Helpful to expunge attention commitments.
• Cross-browser bookmarks (for many devices and browser instances)
• More expansive than bookmarks, gives a good pool of links to search in. Search includes text, not just titles and URLs.
• Didn't work as a read-later tool. (Reverted to using open tabs.)
• Particularly useful for travel info. Faster to access than TripIt. Info like flights and reservations gets clipped. Info like Frequent Flier numbers are pasted into notes.
• Usually she saves the Article view, sometimes the Full Page. Usually not the Simple Article view (didn't seem to work well – might have improved but she hasn't revisited it since then).
• She's always comfortable saving more data than she needs, rather than less.
• If text is highlighted that text is saved along with generic link metadata.
• She has found it's best to keep the organization flat, no nested notebooks.
• Primary navigation is search (except for trip planning)
• She wishes there was a cool format to view what you've saved. There's some web views, just not visually compelling or attractive.
• She's tried to get other people to use Evernote collaboratively with her, but the only person she's accomplished this with is her partner. Lots of overhead to install tools and setup accounts.
• Sometimes people will at least view the stuff she's put into an Evernote folder.

[ianb]

Another interview:

• Uses it only for recipes, for about the last 6 months, after trying some other recipe collection techniques.
• Uses it collaboratively with her partner, both recipe collection and then weekly meal planning.
• Doesn't like the flat UI of Evernote, especially on the website where there are even less cues about how to use it. Also no right-click on the website, and she likes to use those context menus.
• Pattern to make weekly meal: she has one standing note for the weekly meal (pinned so it stays on top). She right-clicks on a note/clip and "copies" the recipe note, then pastes it into the planning note. This pastes a link to the note (not the page) and a simple title (no image or anything).
• Doesn't feel any need for notifications of her partner's work. They often are in the same room while using it. An idea: if there were notifications, suppress them if the people both have the same IP address (and so are probably located together and communicating via other channels, like talking).
• Uses tags for categorizing. Mostly speculative, she doesn't have enough recipes to need it yet. Only tags things that don't already have the tag in the title of the page (e.g., "fall" – but quite a few recipes actually are labelled things like "fall salad" and so don't need the tag). We could add #fall automatically if the tag exists and is in the title? Evernote maybe figures out autofiling to notebooks, but maybe not tags
• On at least one site she saves the PDFs because they are a nicer view than the web page. She has to fill in the title herself then. Idea: could guess some of the metadata for a PDF from history.
• She plays with Article, Full, and Simple Article view to get the best view. She cares a lot about the view of the article. Everything must have an image! Sometimes Simple Article view doesn't get a good image, because the image is always pulled from the actual saved text and Simple Article can lose the main image. She'll actually save the image locally and edit the item to get the right image in if necessary.
• Images are very important – a clip without an image feels hidden. She feels obligated to have some kind of image.
• The pulled image is always the widest image in the article. (For a PDF it is a screenshot of the first part of first page, except for the header area of that PDF.) She's gone in an edited the article to resize images to make sure the correct image is the widest. Mostly works though.
• Pinterest doesn't feel organized enough for her. Doing weekly menu planning through Pinterest wouldn't work well, too many clicks.
• She prepends items with notes on substitutions and other details.
• Would like if she could construct a shopping list. Also would like to be able to multiply out for doubling a recipe and such (this of course requires a sense of units and other highly-parsed information).

[ianb]

As of today, the Web Clipper Chrome addon has 4.4 million users, and the Firefox addon has 400k users.

[ianb]

Note there's an internal test done on Web Clipper as well.

[ianb]

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