A Note To All Developers

The Power Of Notes

No matter what your product does, no matter how great it is, no matter what features you decide to add, there is one feature that is essential, and yet most apps miss adding it. It is a feature that not too many of your users would request because they themselves would not know its use until they had it in front of them. This feature is a simple notes section.

To your user, it looks like a text area where they can enter a note to themselves. To you and me, it looks like this:

<form action="//mysite.com/scripts/update-notes.php" method="post">

<textarea name="mynotes"></textarea>

<input type="submit" value="Save note">

</form>

Depending on where you are saving, what language you are using, the PHP file may vary. I am fond of PHP, so that is my example. The file would contain the code that saves that textarea to a database so that your user can leave a note about your product, no matter what they are doing in it, to themselves.

I have a habit of writing it a notes section into every project I do. It is like inviting someone into your house and offering coffee. It might even be comparable to letting them use the bathroom -- and wallah! -- toilet paper right there! You're welcome! Better that than my wife's towels! (I started to write about those towels, but I'll spare you. Just know... don't touch those towels if you value your life.)

No matter what your product does, no matter how great it is, no matter how useful it is — and there is going to be very little excuse not to have it — but it remains one of the most underrated features, albeit one of the most simple features you will EVER write in your app.

Why Notes?

The power of a notes section — but why? The most genius people in the world will tell you the worst mistake that you can make is not having a pen and paper to write your ideas down. An article from Sublimal Pro states, "we have between 50,000-70,000 thoughts per day, this means between 35 and 48 thoughts per minute per person." (National Science Foundation)

Most of those thoughts are useless, not profitable, and most entail things like what we are going to eat today, making sure the car has gas, remembering to pick up milk on the way home, etc. They are not technically useless, but they pertain more to ensuring our survival or making sure we the do things we need to do. And then there are those that are "money making ideas". These "money making ideas" often result in the web apps you are all creating.

How many thoughts do you think we have that have are million or billion dollar ideas? Most of you are here and reading this because you have thoughts and ideas. Someone had the idea to "bring a television to the homes of everyone" — rare to find a household without a television. Someone later would see these huge computers filling up an entire room and later would want to make them a lot smaller so everyone could have one in their home. Thus, the laptop was born, and almost everyone has a laptop nowadays. Someone had an idea to bring a whole bunch of people together on the Internet... through forums, social media, and chat services. 

How many times do you find yourself opening up a notepad or using a website like MyPost, which is itself, comparable to a website that allows you to jot down your thoughts and share your ideas with others or return back later to whatever you wrote down, but also has its own notes section that is not visible to the public. 

In my recently released web apps, Call Me Private and Text Me Private, which provide virtual numbers for calling or texting, I offer a note section for each and every virtual number added. How much more useful is it to have the notes for your virtual number right in front of you on the website rather than somewhere on your desk or your desktop?

I cannot tell you how many times I've used a web app and everything is great, but there is no where for me to leave any notes about the service. Maybe I just needed to note something while I was in the moment of using the service, or maybe I just needed to make a note for myself about anything else, randomly. Even the hosting company I use (of the few I have or am currently using), there is never a notes section for when I launch a random server. I have to pretty much give it the label of whatever I am using it for, and that label has to give me all the details about what the purpose of it is. Definitely would be easier to leave some descriptive notes for myself about the server!

Notes are useful for everyone who might need to leave a note for themselves or their team members. The notes section doesn't have to be anything fancy. It just has to work so someone can use it to leave a memo for themselves. It might not sound like it would be useful, but between my work laptop, my Linux laptop, and my Chromebook, saving it to a file or even the Drive ends up getting lost eventually. Having it all built right into the app right in front of me helps me know exactly what this is and why I have it here, for whatever reason.

No matter what you are building or no matter what you have already built, consider adding a notes section. It is pretty simple to build in as you are simply saving the input from a textarea or input field into a database and reading it when the user returns to that page. Your users may not thank you directly, but they will most likely appreciate it. Go ahead and give it a try. It is a simple feature that will provide great value to you and your users.