OneNote strengths

Although EverNote has managed to surpass Microsoft OneNote in some areas, OneNote is still strong in formatting text, etc. OneNote’s ability to automatically tabulate content as soon as it detects a table like structure is severely missed in EverNote. The default colors and fonts on OneNote goes nicely with the rest of the Microsoft Office suite to the extent where a note entered in OneNote is no different to a document typed in Microsoft Word.

EverNote strengths

The latest version of EverNote is as mighty as you want it to be. Write once, access from anywhere in the world (which requires a registration on the EverNote server) is the best feature you can cheer upon. The new user interface is very simple and user-friendly. Unlike the OneNote UI which is a candy jar in its appearance, the new EverNote UI has a unique touch and a soothing green shade to it. Once you start working on it, you wouldn’t want to go back to another note taking tool ever.

The bottom line

Many note taking tools roamed but none prevailed to be the best among the rest until the days of OneNote. The introduction of OneNote damaged every other note taking tool’s reputation and took note taking to another level with sophistication and novelty. The lessons learnt from OneNote’s arrival have been put in to practice nicely with the introduction of EverNote 3. The next big thing will be to see how Microsoft strikes back with their next version of OneNote. Or will it be just Microsoft Notes?

When I say regular people, I meant to classify those who do not belong to the school of designers and related disciplines. The five top reasons why Paint is the choice of graphics editing program amongst the common can be stated as follows.

• Paint has an extremely simple user interface and strictly follows the desktop metaphor. Because of this, there is no way a user can go wrong with Paint. There is one window, one canvas and one toolbar to deal with. There is the pallet area too; but most users aren’t afraid of it as they are with other parts of a window.
• Paint starts fast: you don’t have to wait until the next epoch to use Paint. It has such a small footprint and will start before you are done doing a double-click. Another benefit of the small memory footprint is that you don’t need a fancy computer to run Paint on.
• You can only use the most common file types with Paint. Here again, you do something, and save the file in your format of choice without being presented a handful of post-save options. The file is just saved and ready to be used in a few milliseconds.
• You will never rip apart Paint by accident. Most modern software are designed with ‘total UI flexibility’ in mind so that there are 101 toolbars and menus to a density where people are scared to move the mouse pointer across the screen with the fear of moving one part of the UI and sticking it in another area rendering a total mess in the GUI. Paint doesn’t have this prevailing silliness and hence you are a happy user.
• You can buy a new computer and Paint will be there; you can go to a friend’s PC and still Paint will be there. Paint is ubiquitous; it’s installed by default on every computer since Windows 95. It’s totally available to you during the lifetime of your computer and will never expire asking you for a new serial number.

It seems like the main reason for regular people to like Paint is its simplicity. A normal user doesn’t fancy sophistication in software. They want their job done, in the easiest way and in the shortest timeframe.

On Facebook the main navigation is on the top of the page and it show links to Profile, Friends, Inbox, etc. This is fine as long as you are on the home page or on your own profile page. But often users visit other people’s profile pages for obvious reasons. What happens here is that (naturally) users associate the top navigation with the current profile owner. In other words, even when not in your own profile page people tend to associate the top navigation bar with the person they are looking at. So in order to see who’s friends with the currently profile owner, users click on the ‘Friends’ link on the navigation bar. Consequently the association between context and task has been broken and hence the user is mislead.

In experience design word such as ‘my’, ‘your’ and other subjective terms are used to prevent this misleading when the same action can be performed on different objects of the same class. Although this won’t make everyone aware of the current context; it will at lease reduce the confusion among the majority of users.