Tasks were always a concept that were discussed at Evernote. Ever since we had checkboxes in notes and reminders for notes, Users have been hacking evernote to create tasks in alot of various ways.

Overtime this started to bloat the reminder feature and get it away from its true intentions around time.

These thoughts internally started to boil and led us to explore a proper task feature that can allow users to set tasks in a more structured manner.

Once we felt like we had a solid perspective on how we could structure tasks within a note, at the note level and in a task home, the next steps were refining our directions in more higher fidelity.

We first started exploring how to create tasks outside the note in what we called the "task kingdom." Here a user can see all tasks made in notes and outside notes. Thus allowing quick action and overview of all that is happening.

Next we started exploring how to create tasks. Which the first concept was a light weight input box that appears whenever the new task button was pressed. Here the user is able to write quickly the title and date. We kept this as minimal as possible in order to create focus and allow the user to quickly write all that needs to get done.

As we were designing, engineering began building the inital prototype. During this time we started testing out the feature ourselves and noticed areas that could be improved.

One area we started to focus on was the create task button. Around the time we were exploring we were also running growth experiements on what a improved create button could be. This button included not just create new note, but new reminder, photo, and now task.
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We also began starting to improve our task cell in the task kingdom. Our strategy all along was to start minimal and slowly build from there. In doing so we started to see areas we needed to improve. such as exposing a edit task button, and a option to view note content.

We came up with a way that allowed us to do so without adding visual noise and crowding the UI. This was done by exposing options on tap.

After several rounds of iterations, a round of user research and 2 months of development we now had a solid initial experiment to test out and see how viable this new task model is with customers.