RemNote Creation; First Impressions

Archive Feature Requests
#1

Hi, I’m sorry if this isn’t the right place to put this thread. However, I wanted to give some feedback and thought this was best category.

Ease of Use:
After spending three hours of my day creating a subjects worth of different notes, I was greeted with a rather unaccommodating flashcard creation system. This is by far the most annoying thing about Rem for me thus far: it requires a fair bit of effort to get to know. I’m fairly determined when learning something new, but during my time learning RemNote’s UI and flashcard creating system, I repeatedly wondered whether this was going to pay of in the long-run; time will tell whether it was a worthy investment of my time.

My main worry is that, no matter how useful RemNote is, this will always turn people away. The vast majority of the people I know would not have bothered to put in as much time as I did figuring out the flashcard creation system. The purpose of RemNote is to help people learn with greater efficiency, in order to do this on a large scale, you’re going to need a welcoming, and non-intimidating UI.

Recommendations:

  • A clear distinction between flashcard and documents; integration is great, just keep in mind a lot of people don’t want to learn codes for everything.
  • Less modular UI; having multiple tabs open is useful, but can get confusing.
  • More organised filing; by far the most confusing thing was having all my documents, images and PDFs splattered into one place. When I go to documents, all my documents and resources should be organised in the folders I have set up.

Closing:
I hope this was helpful and not too critical :grin:. I see great potential in RemNote and I definitely want to continue using it. However the steep learning curve can get tiresome when it’s for something that is meant to reduce time wasted.

#2

I personally don’t use the card/learning aspect of RemNote.
It would help if you explained more specifically what confused you about it.

Less modular UI: can you elaborate? I didn’t understand.

Filing: have you explored using folders in the sidebar? That’s how most people organize their knowledge. Do a search here (or in the tutorials).

#3

I agree RemNote was a bit confusing in the beginning. I regularly miss clicked and this way created a LOT of unnamed Rem and unused Tags. Sometimes I lost track where I put my notes (would not happen today, because top level Rem now show in the Documents section :grin:).

After a few days of casually using RemNote I got used to it. Admittedly I migrated from Anki, so things like Clozes and Image Occlusion were nothing new. I can only encourage you to keep investing time, as RemNote is a powerful tool. Amongst others, because of the features you (and probably others) felt overwhelmed by. I could go through them and tell you why they are awesome (I honestly did, but deleted the section, because the post became way to long and felt a bit harsh).

Learning a new tool always takes time. But once you master it, it pays off. Think about ten fingers typing. Limiting the power of such tool just to make it more appealing is a step back. And a punch in the face of everyone who did invest the time and is now exploiting the tools full potential.

Nevertheless, I really like the point you are bringing up, about how intimidating RemNote is. I often try to “recruit” new users when I feel they would benefit from using a tool. On Anki this worked well, as I just had to prebuild decks, share them and showcase how effective SRS is. Most of my protégés felt in love with Anki fast. RemNote however does not get accepted as easily (even if it is superior IMHO).

Sad thing is I cannot really nail down how to improve RemNote for beginners, without cropping awesome features I love. Maybe we can improve on the tutorials, guides etc. as described in other posts? Do you feel like this would help? Maybe we can work something out together, that we can agree on?

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