Creating a gallery-like experience in a notes app

As an experienced user experience designer(see what I did there, 😑), I'm constantly thinking of ways I can enhance my users' experience; be it through optimized action flows/journeys or allowing them to customize the app.

The best designers are users of the products they work on and I'm no different; I was viewing photos shared with me in my gallery app some time back, while doing this Ramanie notified me of an upcoming recycling, prompting me to recover notes that had been deleted unintentionally before it was too late. I opened the app and browsed through the deleted notes, trying to find any that should be restored; it felt a little annoying having to view a note, then go back to the list and open the next one. The gallery app experience still fresh in my mind, I asked myself why not swipe through the notes like photos in the gallery?

I immediately got to work describing how it'd function in my notes app, unfortunately I didn't have my laptop with me and had to wait til I was back at the house. Some changes had to be made to the user interface for this to work and that's what I started with as soon as I got my hands on my laptop. Moved a couple of things around in the note content page to ensure the design was cohesive and in a couple of hours I was able to swipe and get another note, awesome! I was almost done - or so I thought.

Engineers only!

That was only the beginning, integrating this with the local database was a seemingly insurmountable challenge. It was one of those tasks that you think will take a few hours to complete but ends up taking days. Not gonna go into too much detail, but here's what I had to do to make sure it works: get the sorting parameters and make sure the next/prev note was accurate according to the params, capture the search query and ensure the next/prev note met the search criteria, I also had to keep track of a note's state and if it was in edit mode save the changes before retrieving the other note. Just some of the things I had to do to ensure optimal user experience.

Part-two incoming...

There were a few more loose ends that needed tightening, I'll talk about them in the second part of this article. Stay tuned for that - July 26th 2024, 1700hrs EAT. For now, get the Ramanie app on the Google playstore or visit our website for more information about the app.