ThoughtPad
A minimal auto-saving online notepad app.
Overview
Digital device adaptation has grown tremendously in the last decade since the advent of smartphones. This has led to people using less physical note-taking products such as pen and paper.
Instead, a digital device is generally used to take down notes as it's always available around us. Generations such as Gen-Z and Millennials, who grew up with tech, prefer using digital devices way more than traditional methods, hence the need for digital note-taking.
Hence the need arose for a note-taking app on digital devices.
Deep Dive
Undeniably, companies have emphasized on digital note-taking since the beginning days of smartphones such as Google with Keep and Apple with Notes.
I started diving into this myself followed by speaking to a few of my friends who all fall in the category of either a Millennial or a Gen-Z. Following this exercise, I came up with a few inputs specifically about the aforementioned apps -
While talking on the phone, the phone itself can not be used as a note-taking device unless the user is willing to use another device such as earphones or speaker mode so the smartphone can be used.
In cases, where the person is at their workplace, they may not prefer to put the phone on speaker mode to take down notes on their phones to maintain privacy.
Going further into privacy, most messaging apps are backed up on the cloud which does add to the convenience but also takes away privacy especially when users note down extremely confidential content.
Further, none of these work without logging in.
This led me to look into other online solutions that were minimal in nature and were just supposed to take notes like an infinite blank canvas.
Existing Solutions / Competition Analysis
Most web-based apps that could provide the functionality of notetaking had the following problems:
Lack of minimalism hence slow - Most had a lot to load in the background hence took time to load
Too much clutter on screen - In addition to the previous point, too much on screen can overload the user’s mind, leading to bad experiences
Login - similar to the apps, many also asked for a login to use.
Further, I noticed, that none of the target users I talked to has ever used any of these online web-based apps. Mostly they didn’t know about it, and once informed they didn’t feel too compelled to use it mainly due to the UX.
So we lacked a minimal app that could be quickly and easily accessed. All that is expected out of such app is note-taking.
Audience
Just to state again, my audience is primarily Millennial and Gen-Z users (the generation familiar with tech from quite a young age).
The Solution
Simply put, we need an app that is:
Privacy focussed: Users don’t want others sneaking & snooping into their stuff
Quick access: Nobody wants to wait when another person is on the phone sharing some important info
Minimal: I think this shall be the focus of any app being designed on this day, especially if consumer focussed, but in this case, it was certainly a necessity
Ideation
With this in mind, I started on the drawing board for ideas. The following are some wireframes I came up -
To sum up, my solution was -
Huge blank canvas with large text size: Minimal screen, only focussed on one task which is taking notes. Large fonts makes readability easy.
Proper feedback: Everytime the user makes a change, the last saved version is shown clearly on the screen.
Autosaving: Anything typed is autosaved so no work is lost ever.
Private: Content is saved in the browsers memory and not cloud so completely private.
Quick loading: As it’s minimal screen, the code is written in such a way and delivered using CDN to ensure it loads quickly.
Easy access: No login, no learning curve. Just type like it’s notepad or textedit and everything is saved. I explored further ideas as well, but kept them for the next version as I wanted to be agile and get the MVP out.
In addition to being the designer, as this was a self-motivated task, I also had to build the app. Being a NoCode enthusiast, I chose the least code to be written and searched on Github for open-source solutions. The auto-saving part was something I found on Github and I cloned it to use. Other parts include standard HTML, CSS and JS, all written by me.
Final Result
The Aftermath
The version 1 of the app received a fairly positive review. It got featured on Product Hunt and was listed as a product of the day ranking at #10 in the top products.
This led to it being picked up by multiple blogs and media.
Version 2.0
The success did teach me a lot but led me to figure out some of the new features to be added. In the following iteration, these changes took place:
Chrome Extention: I had this idea earlier but was planned for version 2. This wil allow the users to automatically load ThoughtPad in a new tab when opened in Chrome which makes accessing it even easier.
Email: Facility that users could use to direclty email the content they have written on ThoughtPad. Due to less usage, I removed this facility later.
Download: This allows the entire content written on ThoguhtPad to be downloaded as a .txt file for offline saving
Donate: If the users feel generous, they could financially support this project as well, similar to Patreon. This too was later removed as I didnt really was focussed on making any monetary gains with this product.
The version 2.0 was also launched again on Product Hunt, and got featured as well.
iPad App (PWA)
Later, I received a message from a person who appreciated this app, especially that person being a writer who also had accessibility issues. The large font size and easy access were specially commended and further requested that this also be available in the form of an iPad app.
This led me to create a progressive web app version, which can be added to the iPad apps menu just like an ordinary iOS app. This saves me time, as I didn't have to create a native app neither had to pay Apple to get listed on the App store, even though for the user the experience was more or less the same.
As of today, I still actively maintain this app.