More than once, I’ve uninstalled an application that for one reason or another did not suit my needs, only to be greeted with one of these all too familiar screens “We’d like to know why you’re dumping our product! Please take a minute to give us your feedback!”

Usually any comments I leave using these forms either get dumped instantly into cybernetic oblivion and are only requested for PR purposes, or may be read and not found to be worthy of any kind of response at all.

You can imagine my surprise when I check my email Tuesday morning and find a reply from the EverNote Vice President of Product Management, Michael Lunsford.

I had installed their EverNote product, an up-and-coming alternative to Microsoft’s OneNote application, a while back after having it recommended by a couple of my regular blogs. I don’t have a tablet PC, so the ink capabilities didn’t interest me at all. I was, however, interested in finding new ways of keeping track of and organizing all the little notes I make about ideas for future blog entries. I downloaded and installed EverNote, but found it a tad lacking. When I uninstalled it a few days later (to return to using OneNote), I decided “What the hell, I’ll tell them why I didn’t like it and make a few suggestions.” I quickly jotted down a few things (shown below), not really expecting anyone to ever read them, and totally forgot about it.

My feedback:

Nice alternative to OneNote, but not yet ready for real competition. The “timeline” type viewing of notes was interesting, but shouldn’t be the only method. A nice folder / tree structure for storing and organizing notes would be a very welcome addition.

Tuesday morning, I received this message:

Chris,

Thank you very much for the feedback you provided as you uninstalled EverNote. We really value this kind of input.

We do have one question, though. You mention that a nice folder/tree structure for storing and organizing notes would be a very welcome addition. We actually thought we had provided this with our Category Panel, which not only allows a folder/tree type of arrangement your notes in categories, but also allows the additional benefit of the ability to assign more than one category to a single note. Did you have something else in mind that our Category Panel doesn’t provide?

Thanks again,

The EverNote Team

I was totally blown away that anyone at all would contact me, much less one of their “Vice Presidents” (even though this looks like a very small shop, where everything is relative). I was so impressed in fact, that I took an entire day to come up with a more detailed explanation and make a few other suggestions in my response, which I just sent earlier tonight:

Michael,

I appreciate your interest in my feedback. I was both surprised and incredibly pleased when I got a response. Generally feedback provided during uninstallation of a product generates very little attention.

Perhaps my feedback was not entirely accurate. The Category Panel does provide a basic tree structure. In addition, the ability to apply multiple categories to a given note is a welcome addition (and one lacking in OneNote, if you ask me).

Now that I think back about my feedback, I believe the feature I was mainly looking for was a slightly different view. In EverNote’s category view, you get all the notes in a category displayed at the same time. If you have a lot of notes relating to one topic, this may be alright. Unfortunately, if you are using categories for broader classification of notes, this can be confusing and difficult to read (they all seem to blend together).

I’d like to suggest an extension of the categories view to a more in-depth tree structure. Each category is expandable to list all the notes assigned to it (which would require the ability to add Titles to notes, something else I find oddly lacking). Then, you have the ability to click on a category itself to see the current view of all notes assigned to it, but also the ability to select a single note to view only it.

Perhaps my usage of EverNote and OneNote differs from the typical user. I have never used either as an ink-based note-taking system, but instead for collecting random notes and suggestions for new blog topics, etc. As a result, broader classification suits my purposes frequently. Rather than having an entire meeting worth of notes that I need to view at once, I have several smaller notes that may have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Given this, my suggested changes would greatly improve usability of EverNote, as well as give it a leg up on alternative packages.

Again, I appreciate your response to my feedback greatly. It’s nice to see a company that communicates with its users and listens to their concerns about a product. If you have any further questions, or need clarification on something I’ve failed to properly explain here, please let me know. I’d be happy to help improve EverNote in any way possible.

Thanks,

Chris Meller

I guess despite all the bad press Dell has been getting about their poor Customer Service lately (links in no particular order and only from the few blogs I read that have covered it), the truth is that it still exists out there in the wild of Corporate America, sometimes in the last place you’d expect it to…