Note Taking on the iPad

Digitise the client meeting experience

Financial client are always looking to improve the client-facing experience. This challenge was to enhance the note-taking functionality on the corporate iPad Pro within the Wealth Management hero application; ‘Customer Meeting App’. Leveraging functionality of existing note taking functionality I proposed a concept of Freehand notes. 

Initial mini workshops helped define scope and feasibility and contributed to managing stakeholder expectations along with providing steering and guidance on UX best practice.

Leveraging ‘sea change’ functionality

Validate any assumptions

Take-aways from these early workshop sessions included;

• Opportunities around the recently introduced iOS Split-Screen multi-tasking 
• The concepts of public v private notes 
• Enhancing what we already had – Meeting Notes available as a regulatory action once a meeting is closed. A form of archiving.

Employing established iOS paradigms to reduce cognitive load coupled with the unique functionality of the Apple Pencil drove early design decisions.

The importance of working closely with your developers

Lean thinking both acts as an efficient conduit between what you design and what gets delivered and secondly massively reduces waste. This note taking concept was born from traditional note taking, therefore having the ability to toggle on-off lined paper was seen to contribute to a richer experience.

Technically this proved a challenge. Including his additional layer, alongside the natural eraser functionality of the Apple Pencil was impacting on the sprint capacity too much. So inevitably, this feature got relegated to the backlog – liaise with the developers at the initial design phases and ‘failing early’ prove invaluable as a process to improve this feature.

Putting user needs first, then prototype testing

Initial sketches generated the concepts to both present and take notes simultaneously; how would native iOS handle this? iOS Split-Screen multi-tasking seemed like the perfect solution.

Further Discovery started to ask questions around existing functionality. Why must a user close a meeting to access their notes? This sparked a new direction – around tabbed ‘Typed’ and ‘Freehand’ notes. I created a prototype and tested it within the team and with the stakeholders. This proved successful in both raising flow awareness and managing what was achievable. Real world design for real world developers. This highlighted the feature ‘gateways’ and clarified developer expectations.

Collaboration and taking advantage of native behaviour

Building a knowledges base across the team and remaining flexible to change

Scenarios, user journeys, prototypes and high-fidelity UI designs were all created and shared. Following several sprint of development, the Customer Advisors now benefitted from the ‘game changing’ Apple Pencil functionality in front of High Net Worth clients. The delight is evident as this design benefitted from cutting edge iOS development with Split-Screen multi-tasking. The existing ‘Close Meeting Notes’ user-flow was replaced with the new ability to access all notes anytime, from any screen.

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