Turning private marks into shared, searchable work
2partnerships: Samsung and Microsoft
9×faster to find a mark again, in testing
64%of new projects shared in their first month
01 · Overview
While I was working at Innovatemap, Folia came to us to build the new version of their annotation software.Their legacy app, iAnnotate, had more than a million users and a decade of features, and every mark it made stayed inside the file it was drawn on. The new version had to work on every screen and let a team mark up the same documents together.
Role
Product Designer, Innovatemap
Client
Folia, the company behind iAnnotate
When
2022 – 2024
Platforms
Designed for web, iPad, iPhone and Android. Shipped on Android, including Samsung's DeX desktop mode, and the web while I was there.
Team
I was the product designer on the account, working with Folia's product lead and its engineers
Outcome
Samsung and Microsoft partnerships
Folia's document view: the page on the left, and every mark on it as its own object on the right.
02 · The short version
Problem.Loyal users, a dated app. A million people marked up PDFs alone, one iPad each, with a toolbar that had grown to fit ten years of features.
What I did.Led the redesign across phone, tablet, desktop and web: the editor and its tools, search across every mark, sharing and threads, and the component library under them.
The result.Led a feature overhaul at Folia that landed Samsung and Microsoft partnerships.
ResearchInformation architectureAnnotation toolsSearchCollaborationDesign systemPen and tablet
03 · Context
iAnnotate had been how lawyers, bankers, professors and film crews marked up PDFs on an iPad since 2010.
The toolbar
A decade of features had piled onto the toolbar: 34 buttons on the first of four sets. Five of them did almost all of the work.
The marks
Search read one document at a time. A colleague's note on the same clause, in their copy, was out of its reach.
The sharing
Sharing meant exporting a flattened copy and emailing it. The discussion about the document happened in the email, away from the page.
04 · Research
Read the complaints, then watch the work
Before sketching anything, I put the old app's history in one place: its store reviews, a year of tool usage, the competition, and what device partners would ask for. Then I sat with people marking up their own documents.
503 written reviews.Every written review Apple's public feeds return for iAnnotate 4 in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, May 2016 to May 2022, coded by theme and by the reviewer's job.
16 interviews.Litigators, analysts, professors, students and a script supervisor, most of them iAnnotate users for five years or more.
6 sit-alongs.Watching people mark up their own work: a deposition, a diligence pack, a stack of essays, a shooting script.
12 months of tool events.Which of the toolbar's tools people actually reached for, and how often they switched.
14 apps, side by side.From Acrobat to GoodNotes, placed on two axes: solo or team, one file or many.
Partner checklists.What a device maker needs before it puts a pen app in front of its buyers: pen support, desktop modes, cloud files, admin control.
The reviews
503 written reviews of the old app, one dot each.
By stars
Sorted by stars, they pile up at both ends: 162 five-star and 160 one-star. Written reviews run angrier than ratings; the app averages 4.7 stars.
By theme
The 280 reviews of three stars or fewer were mostly about trust: lost work, broken sync, and a paid upgrade that took tools away.
The gap
Only one critical review asked to work with other people.To find what nobody thought to ask for, I had to watch people work.
05 · Findings
The work was already shared. The app wasn't.
The interviews and sit-alongs showed what the reviews couldn't: people already worked together every day, by exporting pages and arguing in email.
Finding 1Marks are found again by what they say.7 of 9 attempts to find an old highlight started with a word, not a page number.Design responseSearch reads the words in every mark.
Finding 2The conversation lived in email.14 of 16 interviewees shared marked-up pages by exporting or screenshotting them.Design responseAny mark can carry a thread.
Finding 3Trust came before features.Lost work topped the reviews, and 11 of 16 interviewees first asked if their files would come too.Design responseFolia ran alongside iAnnotate, and always shows whether your work is saved.
Finding 4Work comes in sets.In the sit-alongs, the median task touched six documents, and people rebuilt each folder by hand.Design responseThe project became the unit of work, holding its documents, people and roles.
“The PDF is the record. The argument about it is in my inbox.”
06 · The reframe
In iAnnotate, a highlight lived inside one PDF, on one iPad.
In Folia, every mark lives on its own layer, above the page.
Each one becomes an object, with an author, a page, a type and a thread.
Objects can be searched, filtered, shared and argued about. A mark sealed in a file can't.
07 · Tools
Eight tools, and presets for the rest
I cut the toolbar to what people reached for and grouped it by job: pen, highlighter, comment and area select for marking, then shapes, text and images for adding, with the eraser at the end. Colour, width and opacity moved into presets one tap away, so a power user's setup survived without a wall of buttons.
iAnnotateFolia
Drag the handle. iAnnotate's editor on an iPad, and Folia's: the column of tool tabs gave way to one toolbar grouped by job, and a scrollbar that shows where the marks are.
Try it.Pick the pen or the highlighter, choose a preset, and mark up the page.
The long tail.Share of all marks by tool over a year. The five busiest got the best places, with underline now under the highlighter. Of the other 29, the shapes folded into one tool, photos into Image and the lasso into area select; the rest moved into menus.
Presets one tap away.Three saved mixes of colour, width and opacity for each tool.
A scrollbar that shows the marks.Every mark leaves a tick on the scrollbar, so a long document shows where the discussion is.
Pen draws, finger scrolls.Designed so the pen marks and the finger moves the page, and the two never fight over one gesture.
08 · Search
Find the mark, not the file
One search box reads project names, document titles, the text on every page and every annotation, and keeps the four apart.
The same search the old app ran inside one file, now across every project and every mark. Type a word, or pick a filter.
One card for every match.A second pass at search gave every text match the same card: the snippet, its project and document, and the page it's on. The first pass had no page on a text hit.
Results while you type.Quick results arrive grouped the same way, with filters for type, author and date, before you open the full results page.
09 · Collaboration
The conversation moves onto the page
A project has one member list and three roles: viewers read, contributors add their own marks, editors run the project. Any mark can start a thread, and people are pulled in with a mention instead of an email.
Threads on the mark.Replies and mentions live on the highlight they're about.
Three roles, one list.Viewer, contributor or editor is set from the member list, and an invitation opens before the account does.
One feed for activity.Invitations, replies and new documents arrive together, per project.
Offline, and honest about it.The bar shows online, offline, syncing or failed, and a new upload waits on the device until the connection comes back.
10 · Every screen
Folia had to feel native under an S Pen on a phone or a foldable, on a monitor through DeX, and in a browser at a desk.
Live
A mark made on one screen appears on the others in real time.
Enterprise
Folia opens files from OneDrive. The Microsoft partnership ran through Intune, where iAnnotate already had an enterprise app.
The launch
Six items on the checklist, ticked, and two partners signed. Samsung put Folia beside the Galaxy S24 in January 2024.
On a phone · five screens from the mobile flows, drawn for iOS. Android shipped first.
A project
Search
Reading
Annotations
Pen
Six screens · select one to view it full size
11 · Design system
One library under every screen
I built one component library and designed almost every flow three times, for desktop, tablet and phone.The three layouts are window widths, so a phone driving a monitor through DeX gets the desktop layout. Components carry a density for pointer, touch and pen: compact under a mouse, generous under a thumb, with hover previews under a pen.
Switch the input.One component, three target sizes: the thumb gets room, the pen gets a hover preview.
Tokens first.Colour, type and spacing named once and matched to the names engineers used, so a design decision and its code were the same word.
33
component pages in the libraryFrom accordions to tooltips, each with its states and variants.
4,413
component instances in the final design fileBuilt from 150 components, so a change to one reaches every flow.
3
layouts for almost every flowDesktop, tablet and phone, specified side by side.
12 · Decisions
Five calls, with notes in the margin
I wrote up each call in a Folia document and asked the team that would pay for it to argue back. Their comments are in the margin.
Design decisions · Folia beta5 decisions · 5 open comments
01 Projects replace folders
Work arrives in sets: a matter, a deal, a course. A project holds the documents, the people and their roles, so sharing a project replaces sending a copy.
02 Eight tools, plus presets
Five tools made 91% of all marks. The rest moved into menus, and presets keep each person's colours, widths and opacity one tap away.
03 Run alongside iAnnotate
In 2016 a paid upgrade that dropped features took iAnnotate's written reviews to two stars in two months. So Folia shipped as its own app, next to iAnnotate, and people moved a project over when they next needed to share it.
04 Layouts follow the window
A Galaxy tablet in split screen, a foldable half open, a phone driving a monitor through DeX: one device can be any size. Every component carries a pointer, touch and pen size, chosen by the window and the input in hand.
05 Android and the web first
The Samsung launch set the date, so Folia shipped on Galaxy phones, tablets, foldables, DeX and the web first. iAnnotate's own users, most of them on iPads, waited for a native app.
13 · Outcomes
A week-old highlight, found in 11 seconds
The sit-along task, rerun as a benchmark: find a highlight made a week earlier. One dot per attempt; 12 participants, the same documents, iAnnotate against the Folia beta.
9×
faster to find a mark againThe median person found it 9 times faster. Median times: 94 seconds in iAnnotate, 11 in the Folia beta.
81
usability score for the betaSystem Usability Scale, against 58 for iAnnotate with the same 12 people.
64%
of new projects shared in their first monthWith at least one other person, in the first quarter after launch.
Partners.Samsung featured Folia with the Galaxy S24 in January 2024 and again on its business blog for the Z Fold6 that August. Microsoft lists it as an official Intune partner.
“It's the first time the argument and the document have been in the same place.”
In their words.From a customer call, eight weeks into the beta.
14 · Reflection
What I would do differently
Mining the reviews first was right, but reviews only describe what is broken, never what is missing. Next time the first sit-along happens in week one, not week three.
Designing for the S Pen and the browser at the same time caught problems early. The partner checklist told us what to build. It did not tell us how a device team would judge the result, and we met them late. Next time they sit in critiques from the first beta.
Presets saved the toolbar decision. I would ship them in the first beta instead of the third, before power users decided we had taken their tools away.
