When Goodnotes—the developer behind the handwritten notetaking app of the same time—learned that millions of teachers were using their product in the classroom, it sensed an opportunity.
“We realized they were hacking our note-taking app for teaching,” Minh Tran, chief operating officer at Goodnotes says, by using the app’s “presenter mode” as a de facto digital whiteboard.
Educators make up a sizable part of Goodnotes’ user base, which totals 24 million monthly users worldwide.
Goodnotes Classroom, soft launched in August, assists the teacher in all stages of a lesson: preparation, delivery, and assessment. A teacher can use Goodnotes to design a lesson plan, deliver the assignments to his or her students, and then grade work almost instantly through a new AI tool. Teachers can also disseminate one student’s work to an entire classroom—all on the Goodnotes platform—to assist with learning.
Tran says Goodnotes wanted to explore how to make the product “so simple and so intuitive for the teacher to use, so that their onboarding is as quick as possible and as painless as possible.” But part of the problem was that early adopters—the ones doing the “hacking”—were already experts. “We had to go out of our way to find less technically inclined teachers and talk to them,” he says.
The startup even turned one of their meeting rooms into a mock classroom so developers could observe how teachers might use the app in practice. “Observing users in action is far more powerful than just an interview,” Rowena Chung, the team lead on Classroom, says. “It gave us a lot of insights on where to focus and improve.”
Goodnotes tested Classroom with 16 schools in Hong Kong, all of which purchased the software upon its release, Chung notes. Schools in markets like Singapore, Taiwan, Germany and the U.K. are now using the product.
What is Goodnotes?
Steven Chan founded Goodnotes in 2011, one year after the release of Apple’s iPad. Chan, a mathematics student based in Australia at the time, said he was frustrated by the lack of a good handwriting app on the tablet. The startup received $6 million in seed funding from Race Capital in 2020; two years later, its notetaking app won Apple’s “iPad App of the Year” award.
Goodnotes is now investing further into AI, acquiring dropthebit, a South Korean startup that uses AI to help organize meeting and video content into summarized notes.
Last month, Goodnotes released a series of new AI-enabled services, including an AI assistant that could answer prompts using a user’s handwritten notes as a dataset. The app lets users easily modify, align, and reflow their handwritten text: Think of it like resizing a text box, only with handwriting instead of a computer font.
Tran stresses that Goodnotes Classroom’s AI features are only meant to be a “copilot” for teachers, not a replacement. “No teacher would want to give up the grading process to an AI, right?”
He warns designers not to get focused on “AI for AI’s sake.”
“At the end of the day, AI has to enable your user, empower your users, to do something that they want to do in your app,” he explains.
Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference is returning on Dec. 5 at the MGM Cotai in Macau, China. Panelists and attendees will debate and discuss “Experiments in Experience,” designs that blur the line between the physical and digital worlds to captivate users and foster lasting connections. Register here!
