Ficus Notes
Managing notes often means endless folders, tags, and manual sorting. To solve this, a notes app was designed and launched that leverages AI to auto-categorise notes into folders, lists, and schedules—helping users stay organised without the extra effort.
With built-in intelligence, the app adapts to personal workflows, ensuring notes are always structured, searchable, and actionable.
Product Website - ficusnotes.com | App Store
Overview
iOS - available
macOS - in development
Timeline
Mar-Sep 2025
Tools
Figma, Xcode, ChatGPT
Role
Solo project
Discover
Maintaining systems is a struggle
During a user interview for a project, the participant shared their screen to demonstrate their workflow. At one point, they needed to reference a book and opened their chat to self and searched there. When asked how they usually manage their "to-be-read" list, they explained it was spread across different places— a notes app, Google Keep, occasionally Goodreads, and often WhatsApp.
This mix of tools highlighted how people rarely have a single, consistent system for organizing personal knowledge. This highlighted the trade-offs users make between convenience and structure.
This prompted further exploration into the topic.
Using chat to self for shopping list
Users prioritize convenience even if it leads to fragmentation
Research
Survey (N=48)
An online survey was conducted with a questionnaire focused on understanding how people capture ideas, manage lists, and take notes across different contexts.
Use multiple apps
Notes on self-chat
Lists and notes in different apps
Long Notes/Laptop
Notion
Obsidian
Short Notes/Mobile
Apple Notes
Ease of data entry is inversely proportional to ease of data retrieval.
Interviews (N=8)
Users have interesting systems for tracking their work, hobbies. It ranges from dedicated apps to google sheets. But they struggle to update it regularly.
Interviews revealed a clear pattern: the more complex the system, the harder it was to maintain. Even with structured tools available, people defaulted to easier tools like WhatsApp for its simplicity.
Personal tracking system in Google Sheets
Ease of data entry is inversely proportional to ease of data retrieval.
Solving
Principles followed
Capture should be effortless
Notes must be as easy to jot down as sending a message.
Retrieval should feel natural
Finding notes should work intuitively, without learning complex structures.
Support both quick and structured use
A single system should serve casual reminders and organized knowledge alike.
Reduce maintenance overhead
Systems shouldn't feel like a chore to keep up with.
Navigation
Branding
Greyscale theme is followed to mimic blank page and black ink.
Each leaf/petal is out of a blob. A blob, random shape, combines to make a flower in a circular grid. Making a pattern in chaos.
Development
Technical Implementation
Built a SwiftUI-based notes interface optimized for speed using Swiftdata.
Implemented AI-driven auto-categorization with GPT-4.0 service to reduce manual organization.
Created a scalable architecture to support future features like search, tagging, and cross-device sync.
Testing (N=20)
Beta testing by sharing the build through Testflight platform.
Feedback related to new requirements were documented to be taken up in future releases.
• Schedule Tab - Hard to check time for a task
• Schedule - in the first tab it should be sorted according to date created, not the date of schedule