Switching Note Apps Twice in Six Months: What Survived

The team moved its notes twice in six months, and of 1,240 notes, 380 were opened in the second tool and 41 were opened in the third. The migration was cheap. The re-reading was not.

The team ran customer research for a retail group: interview notes, store visit notes and internal memos, written by five people and read by eleven.

Why the first switch happened

The first tool was chosen by the person who wrote the most notes and stopped working when she left. Nobody else had admin rights, and the export produced a folder of files with names like note-2024-11-07.

Recovering 1,240 notes from that export took two people a week, which is the real cost of a tool with a single administrator.

The second tool

The replacement was chosen for its export format, which was the only criterion that survived the first migration. Notes were plain text with front matter, so a future move would not require a parser.

The team committed to two things: every note carries a date and an owner, and the export is tested every quarter by one person restoring a sample.

What the second tool did badly

Search was slow above 800 notes and returned partial matches that buried the right one. The team’s research notes contain a lot of similar vocabulary, so a search for a store name returned 60 results and the useful one was usually fifth.

Search quality, not storage or features, drove the second switch.

The third tool

The third tool indexed in minutes and ranked by recency, which fixed the search problem for the way this team actually works. Old notes matter less than last month’s notes, which is not true for every team and is true for this one.

Migration took four hours because the export format was plain text, which is the dividend from a decision made six months earlier.

What survived both moves

Eleven notes were read in both the second and third tools, and they shared a property: a title that states a claim rather than a topic. Store visit, week 42 was opened twice. Staffing at the Leeds store is short on Saturdays was opened nine times.

Titles that make a claim get reused. Titles that name a topic get filed.

What was lost

Attachments did not survive the second migration cleanly. Forty-one images were exported as references rather than files, and the originals existed only in the first tool’s backup, which expired.

Audio recordings fared worse and were abandoned as a format. The team now transcribes during the interview, badly, and accepts the badness.

The 380-note problem

Of 1,240 notes, 380 were opened at least once in the second tool, and the distribution was steep: 60 notes accounted for 70 percent of openings. The long tail of never-opened notes was not useless, but it was not being used.

The team stopped writing certain kinds of notes after seeing this, particularly meeting notes that restated what was already in a ticket.

Six months on

No further migration. Search returns the right note in the first three results 84 percent of the time, measured on 50 queries, against 31 percent in the second tool.

What the third tool still cannot do

Notes written quickly during a store visit are messy, and none of the three tools helped with that. The team tried a template with four prompts and found it slowed the writing enough that people stopped taking notes during the visit and wrote them afterwards from memory, which is worse.

The current compromise is a single line per observation during the visit and a longer write-up the same evening, which produces about 60 percent of the detail at 30 percent of the friction.

The access question

All 1,240 notes were readable by all eleven people, which nobody had decided. Two notes contained a staff member’s name attached to a performance observation, and both were found during the migration when everything passed through one person’s hands.

Permissions were added afterwards. A migration is the moment when a team discovers what it has been storing.

One thousand two hundred and forty notes once moved between tools twice and 41 were read in all three. The ones that survived were the ones whose titles said something, and that is now the only writing rule the team enforces.