memonicOfficial Blog

Here at Memonic we’ve devoted much time in the past few weeks to the very core of our product: the clipping experience. We’re aware that clipping from certain — often very popular — websites can be a pain, and we decided to do something about it. The Facebook Save Button is just the first in a long line of improvements and updates we’re working on. Today, we’re proud to announce a beta version of the next feature: the Memonic One-Click Clipper.

In between times when I have to use Memonic to plan something, such as a trip, or ideas for a personal project, I found myself using it almost exclusively to clip newspaper articles or blog posts which I want to read later. There was one minor annoyance, however: being forced to select content every time I want to “Keep the Essential”. Surely computers are clever enough to do that for me?! Well, thankfully, now they are. The One-Click Clipper is a bookmarklet you can add to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. When you find a page you’d like to clip, simply click the bookmarklet once, and it’ll figure out exactly what content you’d like to save and do it all automatically. One click, and the article’s in your Memonic account. Easy!

For the time being, we’re keeping this one on the down-low: sure, there’s this blog-post, and we’ll certainly be tweeting and posting it on facebook for all of our fans, but at the moment the One-Click Clipper is not yet ready to be made the integral part of our product that it’ll eventually become. You may experience some unexpected behaviour, but please do try it out nevertheless, and let us know how you get on!

Facebook is the center of the virtual universe. Well, some might not agree, but with over 500 million users on Facebook (every 13th person on earth uses Facebook at least once month) and the huge amount of time people spend on it, Facebook is an incredibly important part of sharing our lives with our friends. But like many things in our life, information on Facebook is fleeting. Statuses expire after one month. Pictures are removed. Things will eventually go to the data nirvana.

Is there no solution to this? Yes there is! Memonic is proud to announce its newest creation: A Firefox add-on that enhances the platform with a Save Button! It enables you to save, organize and share statuses, photos and more on Facebook. Keep every piece of information you don’t want to lose. We think this is the most exciting thing since the “Like!” button!

Learn more about it and if you like it, join us on Facebook and share it among your friends. Everyone should take advantage of this exciting new extension of Facebook. Join the club!

Today marks the launch of the release of Memonic Extension for Facebook – the long awaited extension of Memonic’s Clipper for the Facebook-lover. With Memonic’s Extension (Currently supported for Firefox, other browsers follow), anyone can save their favorite Facebook photos, statuses and wall posts. Read more in our press releases in German and English, or simply try it yourself.

The holiday season is approaching, the first snowflakes have hit our office window today and the department stores are full of Christmas gear. It’s high time for us at Memonic to spread some holiday mood: we made memonic.com a little more festive. And be sure that you watch the movie: you will learn how Memonic can help you baking your cookies and why you should hide them from your cat!

Are you still missing some Christmas presents? But you like Memonic and think that your friends and family should have an account as well? Then give the Gift of Gathering! You can now easily buy gift subscriptions for other people and surprise them with a voucher code and a gift certificate. And the presentee will undoubtedly happier compared to last year when you gave away wool socks.

In case that you are not happy with the quality of an Item that you saved on Memonic, you can help us improving our service. 
From today on, you will find on the bottom of all of your Items a new link, which reads “Report bad web clippings”. This allows you to send a short report to our Support Team, which gives us a hint on what went wrong. Please take your time to describe and report the problem and we promise that we will do our best improving our quality.

See the full release notes for more improvements.

Last week together Thommy from namics we presented our approach to User Centered Design. Here a few insights from the last 1.5 years developing Memonic.

All starts with your product vision. Many product visions comprise a “Jack of all Trades” approach to product development: Your product should satisfy all and everything.

However being a bootstrapped startup puts you on a collision course with this vision: To do everything at once with limited resources simply does not compute. What now? Do usability tests first.

How did and do we do it?

Right from start we started testing: First with paper-based tests of screen mockups. Simple and effective: Get people to look at your mockups and test their reaction. Just one rule: Close family including girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands are ruled out. Just too close to you and inclined to give biased positive feedback. Family doesn’t want to see you fail. A quick walk to the next coffee will provide plenty testers.

In our case we started with a visual interface. We still believe that a visual approach is a good way to remember unstructured information. We all rather remember visual cues than textual ones. Simple test: Distribute all business cards ever collected on a table, mix them, add one of your own cards to the mix, and take a step back. You will recognize your card immediately based on visual cues: The logo, the specific typeface of your company.

Our interface model at first look as follows:

Then we started testing. Find here the use cases on which we based these tests. Each test consists of a pre-condition preceding the test, the goal of the test, the actual tasks to execute and the expected outcome of the test. Once our users started testing we watched and transcribed.

We tested in cohorts of three: Three groups of three people testing each story three times over an interval of a couple of weeks. The following graph outlines the shifted starting points of each test group. In between each test we worked hard on improvements. Starting with paper-based testing we moved to early html prototypes.

One of the more interesting aspects of this setup is the fact that say in round 4 we test the browse & organize stories by an experienced team (Group A) and people just joining the test program (Group C). Thus we got feedback from experienced hands as well as newbies (at our interface that is).

The user feedback for our first ideas was really good for the visual idea and the browse aspects of the interface. Small wonder: People are used to this type of interfaces by now from smartphones and tablets.

Yet we received thumbs down as soon as we asked the testers to organize their clips in groups and start working with these sets. Simply didn’t work.

A change of course was required: We thought long and hard about notes and note taking. A note is similar to an email: a subject (or none) and some content. The next iteration of our interface thus was based around the email paradigm.

A number of iterations later we were at the current interface. And we know there is ample room for improvement. Yet following the startup stance of “release early – release often” we opted for user feedback instead of ebony tower thinking.

Today we have setup some continues tests run on User Testing.com and we rely on direct user feedback. We receive plentiful feedback. Boris, a guy from the Belorussia even sent us a carefully crafted 8 page usability review of Memonic.

Note taking in the Internet realm is a relatively new. Thus there is no dominant design yet like say in email interfaces or word processors. Even though they differ from supplier to supplier the core feature set and user interaction patterns are the same.

That leaves room for much advance in user interaction design and usability improvements of any such note taking application including ours.

Stay tuned.