Among the most important skills a Product Designer must have, well any kind of designers actually, is the skill of note-taking. It is too often that I witness very good designers got in trouble with their stakeholders due to occasional untimeliness, which after further investigation was caused by they forgot that they have those assignments or missed the details.
In a teamwork setting, such forgetfulness could create a bottleneck that creates a mess, delayed production or last-minute task reprioritization of the development team due to design unreadiness.
Upon note-taking, there are several goals to achieve:
- Meeting minutes: what are the key takeaways of the discussion?
- Action points or task: what to do next and by who?
- Deadline: when it should be done?
While there might be a dedicated note-taker in a meeting, sometimes they fail to capture the details that are related to the individual designer’s role. While the team might also use task management tools like Asana, if it is not updated regularly then some tasks might not be mapped.
Among the tools I found useful for note taking are as follow:
- Google Keep (Android, iOs, Web) – It’s versatile, simplistic, and accommodate different types of notes. It’s also come from Google meaning it’s easily integrated with other Google products like Google Tasks and Google Calendar
- Apple Notes (iOs) – It’s simplistic yet powerful, and it comes along most Apple’s devices, e.g.: MacBook, and iPhone
- Pen and Paper (real world) – good old notebooks that you can carry around, put in your bag, unlimited screen time, no recharging ever needed, timeless
What’s your favourite note-taking tool and why?