Pagico is a great app, and it should have received more positive reviews than it is now due to the steep learning curve for many new users — in other words, Pagico is not easy to learn.
However, the other half of people (our customers) told me that they really love Pagico. I’ve been told something like “the most well engineered personal management system”, “too low-priced”, “So confident it can improve my productivity”, etc.
So, is Pagico intuitive or not? Well, I’m not confused at all about this question.
There are several aspect to this question. The first would be:
What makes an app intuitive?
First of all, let’s think about the top 3 intuitive apps in your personal view. What are they?
If you’re a mac user, they could be: iTunes, Mail, the column view of Finder, or whatever. If you’re a windows user, then they could be … (I can’t think of any… because I’m a mac user 😀 no offense to windows apps).
But you’ll suddenly find all those are not new apps, or in other words, you’re familiar with them so you can do some tasks even without “thinking” or “learning”.
Yes, that’s the main reason that they’re intuitive to you. So, judging something intuitive or not is largely based on your previous knowledges.
Take my dad as an example. He has just switched to Mac several weeks ago. Now he still prefers to use the finder in “large icon view” because that’s an ordinary file manager view as windows provides. And that’s what he is familiar with. Isn’t the column view of finder much better in presenting hierarchical structure of folders and easier for navigating? Yes. But it takes time to learn. So it’s not intuitive for him, at least for now.
Some may argue that they’re intuitive because they have simple features with intuitive interfaces. My answer is the same: you think it’s intuitive because you’ve already memorized them (interface, feature, etc).
Why is Pagico hard to learn for many users?
After observing for months, I found out that the main problem is that Pagico comes with so many new concepts that few can understand most of them in a short period. I think that is the negative effects of innovation.
Users tend to get lost the moment they get into Pagico: no calendar, no tree view, no “todo” section, no … in short, almost nothing is expected for a PIM. It’s nearly completely new to them.
So, with this conclusion, the resolution would be:
To follow the mainstream, or keep innovating?
By “follow the mainstream”, I mean design features that the majority of users is familiar with; by “keep innovating” I mean keep thinking of new great ideas and implementing them in Pagico.
But I think my answer is already there: Revolution is needed.
Any file-system-alike structure is not suitable for categorizing and organizing knowledges because they were not designed to accomplish such tasks.
Why would we have to change our natural way of thinking into the way operating systems do? We need something that works like our brain. And that’s the main belief behind Pagico — create an organized and efficient environment that is brain-friendly on your computer.
But what’s your opinion about this? Or, how do you think about Pagico?
I’d really love to hear! 🙂
That said, I’m still working very hard on making Pagico easy to learn and use. Some screencasts for doing common tasks in Pagico will be made in the upcoming weeks, hopefully that will help most new users getting used to Pagico in shorter time.