Interview with Evernote Food product manager Naomi Pilosof

If you remember, in December we launched the new Evernote Food application for iPhone, which allows users to save all their notes and memories related to food, food, restaurants, etc. This product manager Naomi Pilosof gave an interview where she told about the features of this project, its role in the Evernote strategy and certain aspects of the development, which we publish below.

Product

- Compared with similar applications and services, what are the key differences and advantages of Evernote Food?
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Some of the most memorable moments in our lives are somehow related to food. This, of course, is about food in a broad sense, and not about a specific dish, meaning not only food, but also people and places. Evernote Food gives you a tool to remember everything that makes some dinners memorable for you. These are images and signatures to them, the location of the institution, labels and other notes that will help you remember the dishes and memories that are somehow connected with them.

Evernote Food can be used as a personal archive, but the application also offers tools that make it easy to share your lunch memories with other participants, with your friends and acquaintances on social networks.

- What is the most interesting feature in Evernote Food?

After the lunch information is stored in Evernote Food, it becomes part of the Evernote account. Evernote, in turn, begins to play a connecting role for various user memories and notes made in different Evernote applications. These related memories together form a single rich historical picture of the user's life.

- What is the purpose of the development of Evernote Food?

Food is an important part of our life, and we want to provide users with more comfortable and beautiful conditions to save, view and share food-related content.

- Please tell us about the concept underlying Evernote Food? When did the company start developing?

It is appropriate to quote Evernote CEO Phil Libin: “We are trying to escape from Evernote as an unstructured repository of your thoughts and memories. We want the service to represent important things more intelligently and structured. ” When choosing a focus on a particular use of Evernote, we knew that many people already use the product to take food photos and store them in their Evernote accounts. Now we give the opportunity to do it better, easier and more expressive.

- What benefits and advantages should Evernote launch from Evernote Food?

Evernote is a powerful product that can be used in many different ways, in many different areas. Although this is an advantage of Evernote, its functionality may seem redundant to new users and cause them difficulties: how to get started. Now with Evernote Food we remove this psychological barrier, letting people know that this application allows you to create, store and - if they want - to share information and experiences related to food and cooking.

Users love this application for its capabilities: from storing memories of a fun dinner with friends and writing step-by-step recipes to keeping a diary with restaurant reviews, descriptions of dishes, diet schedule and other tasks of healthy eating.

Food is a good entry point to the world of Evernote for new users. In addition to the Evernote Food application, there is also the Evernote web clipper, which is an excellent tool for copying recipes from the Internet, there are shopping lists that are conveniently stored in Evernote so that they are on hand anywhere, anytime. When users see the power and food options of Evernote, they can discover other ways to use Evernote for personal and business needs.

Development

- Have you studied the market needs and trends, the wishes of users or any other information before starting work on Evernote Food?

Yes, I analyzed the growing interest in this topic and studied various applications on the market that are somehow related to food. There are many tools for finding new recipes and participation in the culinary community, but only a few focus on preserving the user's personal memories associated with food.

- In continuation of the topic, what challenges did the development team face, and how did you cope with them?

The challenge was to make an application that is closely related to the basic functionality of Evernote, but at the same time being a complete individual product. There are several features that our team liked to use mainly Evernote, but not all of them fit well into the Evernote Food interface. We made decisions, constantly looking at the needs of the user. The target group of Food users is only part of the target audience of Evernote, and we tried to focus on the needs of food lovers.

- How to strike a balance between originality and reality? How did the development team solve this problem? Are there any examples of adjustments that had to be made when developing Evernote?

Evernote Food and Evernote Hello were our first products, where we moved away from the usual design, the first case of using notes in a structured format that was designed specifically for the needs of these two applications. We felt that working with Evernote Food and Hello should lead users of these apps to the main Evernote. This was especially true of Evernote Food: information about food, as a rule, is shared with others. Our goal was to “show the goods face”. The created notes perfectly represent the information about the food that the user has saved, although at present they cannot be edited in the main client, who is not yet able to work with structured data.

- What are the standard procedures for developing a new application in Evernote?

Teams of developers, marketers and managers define the business goals of the new application. Decisions are made on the basis of content, target market, mobile platform, etc. As soon as work on a project begins, a set of functions is determined together with a team of developers, including a designer, programmers and a product manager. The development is divided into weekly phases with a subtotal, where the testing service actively participates, ensuring that all points above the “i” will be placed in a timely manner.

- Can you mention any techniques or techniques used in the development?

We followed the agile development process, which involved frequent iterations of versions based on user feedback.

- How long did it take to develop the first version of the application, and how many people included the team?

It took about two months from concept creation to launch. Development began in the fall and was very busy, as everything had to be ready to launch and announce the application at the LeWeb 2011 event in Paris at the beginning of December 2011. Initially, the team included a project manager, designer and developer, who simultaneously worked on other projects.

- Did the team have to make changes to the interface or functionality due to iPhone restrictions?

No, I didn't have to change anything.

- There are many limitations when developing applications for the iPhone. According to Evernote, how can a developer create ideal applications with a rigid framework?

We do not consider the development for the iPhone strictly limited, we consider it as an opportunity to create something really beautiful and convenient for our users. The simple elegance of the iPhone set the tone when designing Evernote Food.