How the Khoury co-op program helped improve a best-selling app

Imagine you’re a Northeastern student beginning a co-op.

You’re excited to start, maybe nervous about starting in a pandemic because you won’t see your co-workers in person, and certainly apprehensive about the skills you’ll need to pick up. Your work centers around Notability, a sleek note-taking app that you’re responsible for tweaking and improving.

Oh, and it’s also the most popular paid app on the market.

Top row (L to R): Zack Martin, Claire Illich. Bottom (L to R): Jack Rosen, Matt Todd.

This is what happened for three Northeastern co-ops working at San Francisco-based Ginger Labs. The new Mac version, released in March, has added to the resumé of an app that has attracted nearly 20 million users since its release in 2010. And it bears the fingerprints of Zack Martin, Matt Todd, and Jack Rosen, Khoury College undergrads who have worked on the app remotely for months.

Northeastern Co-ops, Take Notes 
Amber Meyers, assistant co-op coordinator and employer engagement specialist within Khoury College, says there are many paths that can result in a company establishing co-op positions — it often hinges on a connection with a Northeastern alum. In this case, the connection was Claire Illich.

“I was looking for a small iOS development team to join [in 2018],” Illich mentions, recalling that while her new co-workers initially teased her for using a Notability competitor in her time at Khoury College, “It was just a dream job and I was super excited to get the offer.”

On forming the relationship with Illich, Meyers says, “My colleague Melissa Peikin, who’s the director of our undergraduate co-op team, had worked with her and made an introduction.” Meyers continues, “Claire was really interested in bringing co-op to her company, and after talking with her colleagues, they seemed excited about doing something new like that and engaging with Northeastern students. So I worked with her to pilot the co-op program there.”

The Ginger Labs co-ops, like many of their Khoury College classmates, have yet to physically enter their office. But Meyers notes that computer science roles lend themselves well to a pandemic setup.

“Khoury College students transitioned really nicely to working remotely,” she says. “Traveling to a new city has been a challenge during remote work, but it’s also opened up possibilities to work for companies you might never have been able to relocate to.”

Hopping on Board 
Zack Martin was the first Khoury co-op in the door in July 2020, with Matt Todd and Jack Rosen following six months later. The three are fifth, fourth, and third-year computer science majors, respectively, and they’d all worked software co-ops before. For Illich, who managed Martin, the onboarding question was essential.

“I was concerned about getting him familiar with the team and feeling comfortable asking people questions,” she says. “That’s 100 percent the biggest hurdle for completely remote internships.”

So Illich set up meetings for Martin with different teams and people, and even included mini scavenger hunts to make it as fun as possible. Martin says it helped.

“When I got there, they provided me with all these tutorials and all this information. Any questions I had, I could reach out to anybody for help,” he remembers.

Pandemic team building is tricky, but all three say it has worked. Rosen notes a recent event wherein the company shipped Boba tea-making kits to employees, which they cracked open and learned to use over video chat. Todd remembers a game of “drawing telephone” in which, instead of passing terms by speaking, they each sketch the term in the Notability app and pass it to the next person.

But Todd also says the workplace culture runs deeper. When he mentioned during an HR one-on-one that he wished for more integration between the teams for Notability and Twobird — Ginger Labs’ email program — “They were immediately like, ‘We’re going to do more events where people from both teams are coming together.’”

This concern for a cohesive atmosphere also extends to interviewing candidates, which Martin says the team involves him in.

“They always respected my opinion and asked me what I thought. They never excluded me from any discussion,” he says. “They made me feel like a part of the company and not just some intern.”

Notable Responsibilities 
The crowning jewel of Ginger Labs is Notability, the most popular productivity app of the last decade. Its mission: toss as many sleek, helpful features as possible into a user-friendly interface.

Notes can be imported or created from scratch, organized into subjects and dividers, and sent as different file types through different apps. Users can control page type and color, scrolling format, font attributes, thickness, and color for highlighters, pens, and erasers, and automatically format their rough shapes and handwriting. There are also plenty of multimedia features — speech-to-text; adding photos, documents, GIFs, and web clips; and recording audio while taking notes, then navigating the recording and the notes simultaneously.

When the co-ops stepped onto the Notability team, they began with similar responsibilities.

“It really starts off with bug fixing,” Illich says. “I can’t tell you how important it is for our app, our users, and the co-ops because our app base is massive [and] 10 years old. So there are parts of it that are very difficult to understand at first and it takes time to ramp up.”

“We had bugs that weren’t the highest priority that people would complain about,” she continues. “And Zack and Matt and Jack come in and they fix them. And it massively impacts our users. They’re not doing sad little stuff. They’re doing stuff that makes us a more competitive app.”

The adjustment period was different for each of them. Rosen came in with plenty of iOS experience, so he adjusted quickly and moved on to other projects, including a soon-to-be-released feature that lets users group their handwriting and move it as one unit. Todd and Martin lacked such iOS experience, so they spent their first weeks familiarizing themselves with the code base.

“You’re here to learn,” Martin says. “If I had only done a two-month internship, I would have just showed up, probably had a full understanding of the code base by the end, and had no real project. So having six months … gave me the ability to start on projects.”

And the freedom to choose their projects was another thing that surprised them.

“A lot of other companies would probably just tell you, ‘Here’s what you’re going to work on,’” Martin says. “But it’s really nice to have that choice yourself, because you can then pick what you might be interested in.” He says that feedback from his co-workers was immensely helpful in gauging the difficulty of potential projects. Rosen adds that he “had free reign over things that needed to be done or cool features that could be added.”

In time they would all select projects. Rosen aimed to give users the ability to open multiple notes in the same location, fixing something that had long bothered him and his friends. Todd worked on a new interface view for how notes are displayed, trying to make larger, more visible thumbnails. And Martin — annoyed by how difficult it was to take digital notes for his math classes — designed an in-app purchase that allowed users to convert hand-drawn math into LaTeX, typesetting used for textbooks. It was downloaded nearly 18,000 times in April, and Martin says he’s proud of the impact it has had.

“The people at Notability really trust us. They really give us the responsibility and then we make what we can of it,” Martin says. “There are always people there to help you, but they trust in the design decisions that you’re making and all of the things that you’re doing.”

Return of the Mac 
The newly released Mac version of Notability is not the first one Ginger Labs put out. But, as Martin explains, the previous version had issues that made it less usable than the popular iPad version. Then Catalyst came along.

“Catalyst is a new technology that Apple introduced in 2019 to get iOS apps to Mac — they said, by the click of a button,” Illich explains. “But it took us about a year to get it ready.” She adds, “Zack was so critical for checking things off. He was a great, energetic part of the team.”

“The Mac project started in December,” Martin remembers. “There was already a fundamental base of the code, but it was still very buggy. You couldn’t really use it. So they put me in that to help get it working and fix any bugs. It was really cool to see how minimalist and broken it was, and then slowly finding little things to fix and watching it become what it is now, which is this Mac app that is super successful, looks great, works great.”

“I was just using it for one of my classes,” he adds. “I’ve been using it every single day. It’s awesome to be using a software that I literally built. It’s really gratifying.”

Rosen, Todd, and Martin have all extended previous co-ops past the usual six months. Martin has already done so with Ginger Labs, working full time in January and part time for most of the rest of the semester. He graduated in May and joined Ginger Labs full time a few weeks later. Todd (graduating this fall) and Rosen (spring 2022) say they would gladly do the same if offered.

The company’s decision to hire three co-ops for the upcoming fall cycle — plus its plans to continue hiring co-ops — show the value of the contributions undergraduate Khoury students can make to apps like Notability.

“Students are by far our biggest users. So you’d come in not only with technical experience, but with personal experience of notetaking,” Illich says. “Your insights, your input, your work will be just one part of the team and will go out to tens of millions of people who use our app every day. You’ll get a lot of visibility and a really good experience of working at a company that produces an app that a lot of people use and love.”

Check out Notability here.

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