A notebook that tests you on what you wrote.
An iPad notebook for students. Mark what matters while you write, and it comes back as a question before you forget it.
My role. Solo product designer. I used Claude for research, checking and process automation, and to write the code. Every design and technical decision, every test and every change was mine; AI helped me carry them out.
As a student I tried many digital notebooks, and each one took time to figure out. After a while I'd realise I wasn't studying: I was learning the app's features. So I went back to paper, where everything was in front of me and I could mark what mattered and bookmark what I needed.
Not long ago some friends of mine started university, and the question came up again. What I didn't make for myself back then, I decided to make for the students who come after me.
Everything you need is in front of you from the first time you open it. Pages run as one continuous strip, with an empty page always waiting below. There is no "next page" button: a student in a lecture shouldn't be distracted by extra controls.
I built TakeNotes on published research. Twelve university studies give exact numbers on which study methods work; a handful of interviews would have told me what a few people prefer. I also had my own years as a student, and friends who just started university: many struggle with revision, and not everyone knows how to study well.
Sources: Roediger & Karpicke 2006 · Hartwig & Dunlosky 2012 · Dunlosky et al. 2013.
Every student underlines differently and marks different things. So I made a scale: small, underline or circle with the pen; bigger, for whole sentences or lines, the question marker; largest, a dashed box that turns a whole block into one question. You use one tool all the time, or switch as you go.
Pen underlines ran into technical problems in the prototype. They were solved in the real app, where the recognisers were tested on strokes recorded from my iPad: 22 of 22, 9 of 9 and 7 of 7 marks found on three pages. One writer, a few pages: a good sign, not statistics.
A highlight isn't always a question.
In real lectures, many students highlighted the topic title just to see where the next topic starts. I do the same. So I kept the question marker and added a real highlighter, in a separate group of the tool column, so it's clear which tool does what. The toolbar took more rounds than anything else in the app.
On my earlier projects I designed everything by hand in Figma, then gave it to Claude as the reference to follow. This time I asked: what if I only direct? Most design decisions here were made through words. I described what I wanted, Claude built it, I reviewed and corrected. I went back to designing by hand only for the landing page.
The vision, every decision, every review, all tests on the iPad.
Research drafts, the Figma screens and design system, the code of the prototype and the app.
The landing page pass in Figma.
very pixelated. I asked for a blank sheet that writes itself instead; the handwriting now draws from the real vector strokes.
ugly, to put it mildly. I insisted on Apple's real product bezels.
The web prototype I tested on my iPad before the native app; nothing is saved. Open it full screen.
Native app, iPad simulator, demo content.
They are worth different things, so I never mixed them.
The tracking system: a calendar of classes and exams that knows what's next, and the quiz statistics. Testers singled them out.
I wanted to try being a visionary who runs the process from above and steps in by hand when it's needed. That role worked: I kept the vision of the whole project, from inside and from outside. It's a skill I'll take into my next projects.
Many of my edits went into the toolbars. Next time I'd sit down first and study how toolbars work and what makes them comfortable, and get there faster, in fewer tries.
