Lurnby Notes - beta testing, continuous feedback, and time for things to click.

This was a bit of an obvious feature, but it took me a while to realize it.

I had known that reading while taking notes was a common experience for a lot of people but I believed that it was important to use my existing highlighting feature for that.

Luckily, once I got to beta I started to actively use my tool myself as the first beta tester. This helped me to really put Lurnby to use and start to uncover challenges in the user experience.

One of these was the issue of note taking. I had increasingly started to feel frustrated by wanting to write something down, but not wanting to highlight anything as that would create extra data.

In talking to some people who fit my audience, they mentioned to me how they read with a google doc to the side. And then it finally clicked for me.

I had known about reading with a notebook to the side - as I had also done that repeatedly, but it took the combination of testing the system myself and then hearing about someone else's practice for it to click in my head.

I spent the next 4 days thinking about how I could quickly prototype that experience and realized that for the most part, I had all the necessary structure already. I just needed to add in a WYSIWYG editor and expose it in the browser.

1 full day of work and some hours spread out over 3 days - and boom - it's live.

I think it will make a qualitative difference to the user experience. At least to my own.