You can only Touch User Interface (UI)

What happened to Google Notebooks and what can we learn from web applications in general.

What was Google Notebooks?

Google Notebooks was a web application that shared similar functionality to Google Docs and Google Drive. The concept was to replicate the functions of a paper notebook, but in your web browser and hosted on the cloud.

Google Notebooks came with all the bells and whistles you would normally expect: the ability to collaborate, share, make public, and even a "Note This" on search results.

On the surface, Google Notebooks was a good concept and an interesting idea. A lot of people use paper notebooks and, as someone who carries paper notebook around, I find a lot of people telling me that they wished they carried a notebook around with them, too. So why did Google Notebooks get pulled?

Failure or change of focus?

If Google Notebooks had been a critical success, Google would not have killed the service. There is no doubt Google Notebooks had a committed group of users, but probably not enough users to validate the service. Plus, Google Notebooks was competing with Google Docs - Google cannibalized itself. If you are trying to capture market share, it's about focusing the energy on a single definitive service. No more "Should I be on Docs or Notebooks? "

While Google Notebooks did not fail outright, it was not a success. While we can't say with certainty what went wrong, we can be pretty sure that Google Notebooks failed to attract the masses - and I want to know why.

Humans generally fail at utilizing real paper notebooks.

I wish I could present you an empirical article that provided real evidence to substantiate my feelings here, but I can only offer you anecdotal evidence; nod your head if you agree or write nasty comments if you disagree.

• How many notebooks do you own that only have the first few pages filled out?
• How many times have you heard "I should carry a notebook with me at all times, that's a good idea!"
• If lots of people filled paper notebooks out on a regular basis, real notebooks would not cost $25.00 at Chapters/Indigo and $2.84 at Staples/Office Depot (this one is a stretch in terms of anecdotal evidence but..maybe?)
• How many notebooks have you received as gifts, and how many of them are sitting empty in your closet?

The Purpose of a Notebook

The purpose of a notebook is to record and organize information/ ideas/ emotions/ stories in a way that is meaningful, structured, retrievable, enlightening, funny and nostalgic. The notebook is also said to be a tool of creativity, problem solving and catharsis.

Clearly, I believe that carrying a notebook with you at all times is a great idea, but why do so many of us give up so easily?

Reasons why filling out paper notebooks is hard:

• A complete thought/idea rarely comes at once. You might get inspiration one day, and write about it. A few weeks later you might gain additional insight and wish to add that insight to your original jottings. If you are filling up the notebook page by page, a lot of the ideas become fragmented across the notebook. Instead of having fragmented ideas in your head, you now have them fragmented over a notebook, or multiple notebooks.
• It takes too much time to make table of contents or perform similar indexing strategies.
• It is not always realistic to discretely categorize each entry on the fly. Sometimes you have to roll with the ramblings.

I have personally used notebooks for years and have a fat stack of them rusting dusting away. Even after years of using notebooks, my collection is still horribly disorganized. No amount of planning the next "Concept-Notebook" actually changes anything. After a week of use, they always revert to monsters of disorder.

Reasons why filling out Google Notebooks was hard:

See the list above but add the following bullets:

• You had to boot up your computer and log in every time you wanted to make a note.
• Although there was extra room to add things post-hoc, you faced the problem of physically finding the original idea.

A Google star

Somewhere, someone had a vision to make Google Notebooks a world class web application. But it didn't catch and now it's gone.

The vision of Google Notebooks was to simply replicate an old technology (the paper notebook) on  new technology (namely, the cloud and your browser.) But the vision did not really attempt to solve the old problems associated with the notebook. What was left was a service that failed in the same ways that a real notebook fails us. What's the lesson here?

You can only touch User Interface (UI)

You can touch, but you can't feel. At the heart of it, a web application is nothing but a tool. If the tool is too complex, too few people will find it useful. If a tool is too simple, it won't be useful. Google Notebooks was easy to use, but it lacked complex (some might say, interesting) features that could solve the problems with notebooks in general.

Web applications will always have a bottle neck, and that bottle neck is User Interface. How can the user perform complex tasks in an easy to navigate interface that can be intuitively understood? A Question worth pondering.