Field note · 2 April 2026
Opening a notes app is not the same as using its tags
Tags are explained in every tour we have watched. They still lose to a single long note, a folder named “misc,” or a search the person already trusts.
Farid Hassan
A notes app can look healthy on a dashboard because people open it every morning. In observed sessions around Kuala Lumpur, that daily open often meant one of three things: dump a thought, find yesterday’s dump, or paste a link for a colleague. Tags, notebooks, and nested folders sat to the side like spare cutlery.
We asked people to find a note from the previous month. Almost nobody reached for a tag they had created during onboarding. They scrolled, they searched a distinctive word, or they asked the colleague who had been in the original meeting. One accounts assistant in Gombak kept a single note titled with the month and typed into it as if it were a paper pad. She had completed the tagging lesson on day one. She could not remember the tags.
This is not laziness. Tagging asks someone to classify a thought before they know whether the thought will matter. During a busy morning at a logistics desk, that extra decision is exactly what they postpone. By evening the note already “lives” in search, so the postponed decision never returns.
For product leads, the implication is unkind to feature lists. A tag system can be complete, even handsome, and still sit outside the work. Adoption here is not a matter of a clearer icon. It is a matter of whether classification ever becomes cheaper than scrolling. In several walkthroughs, the moment people did use a tag was when a manager asked for “all the supplier complaints from March” — a retrieval job that search by keyword could not finish.
If you want this studied, do not send us the taxonomy. Send us two real retrieval jobs from the last quarter, and we will watch whether anyone reaches for tags when those jobs appear again.