GoodNotes
Tags & Reminders: study tools built with a six-person team at GoodNotes to help students tag their notes while writing and get reminded to come back and review them. I worked on the tag visual design, the interaction patterns, and the reminder center.
Tags and reminders, built to fit how students already study
Tags and Reminders are study tools built to help students take better notes and actually come back to review them. They give students a way to create notes with clearer information hierarchy, and make learning more enjoyable and efficient by encouraging consistent revision instead of a single cram session before an exam.
I worked on this in 2023, as a Junior Designer during my two years at GoodNotes, on a six-person cross-functional team of designers, product managers, and engineers. My part covered the tag visual design and interaction patterns below, plus the reminder center: connecting a saved note to a dedicated review flow that brought students back to it.
Three research questions, one shared insight
Most study apps at the time had gone one of two ways: basic note-taking with no real study layer on top, or subscription-based tools built around templates. We wanted to stay focused on the core note-taking experience itself, and understand what would actually help students learn faster rather than just take notes faster.
Research organized around three questions: what affects a student's confidence in their notes, what they prioritize while taking them, and how they build a habit of coming back to them. The clearest pattern to come out of it was that students struggle most in the early stages of learning, before organization and prioritization become second nature, and that the real lever was tactile: how a student physically interacts with a notebook is what determines whether the notes stick.
That became the design goal: bridge a connection between students and their notes so that note-taking itself becomes part of remembering, and stays fluid even when a professor is moving fast. My part of that research was translating those insights, organization, prioritization, and the habit of coming back, into the interaction model the rest of this page walks through.
From labeled buttons to a visual language
The tool is inspired by physical tags, the kind students already stick onto paper notes to flag a thought or a question. The first version of that idea on screen just stated the tag's name directly, like "Review," as text on a colored button.
That felt closer to a label than a tag. To make it feel like something you'd actually stick onto a notebook and recognize at a glance, I designed a simple visual shape for each tag type instead, drawing on tag shapes people already use in the real world rather than a plain rectangle.
Built to feel like a physical tag, not a menu
The tag modal shows up when a student wants to add a tag to the page. Tags were designed to feel like buttons you tap rather than shapes you drag, which keeps the placement accurate: there's no gap between opening the modal and landing the right tag exactly where you meant to.
Tags also aren't just a visual flag. They can expand to show more, like the actual question a student wrote, and can be marked resolved once it's been studied, or hidden from the page later through settings without losing the note underneath it.
Three passes at where the settings should live
Where a tag's settings live turned out to be its own small design problem. The first pass put one shared settings page behind the toolbar for every tag. It was simple to build, but it meant a tag's color picker had to be shared with the pen tool, the toolbar was already crowded, and there wasn't room to customize an individual tag.
The second pass gave each tag its own settings, opened through an individual modal. That solved the customization problem, but the modal itself grew long, and getting to it meant a real detour: drag from the toolbar, then tap through a full settings screen just to mark one tag.
With Fitt's law in mind, that drag from the toolbar to the page was the real cost: high physical effort for what's supposed to be a quick, light gesture. The direction we landed on instead was surfacing tags through a long-tap on the page itself, with settings tucked behind an edit action rather than up front, the balance we kept coming back to across every pass: quick access to a tag without cluttering the note-taking surface itself.
Six people, one set of tags
Everything above shipped into an app with an existing, established user base, which is a different kind of design problem than building something from zero: a tag shape or a settings location had to fit habits students already had, not introduce a brand new one from scratch.
Being one of six also meant most of my decisions were arguments, not choices. A tag shape or where a setting lived had to survive being explained to five other people before it shipped. That's slower than deciding alone, and it's also why none of it felt precious by launch: whatever survived had already been tested against someone else's objection first.