14 ms·

UX Issues with Notion

210 points by g7r 6y ago

fnl 6y ago
My main reason for not using Notion is that its search is half-baked: You cannot search for headlines and body content in a single query. Say if you query for "H B", and H is only in the headline, while B is only in the body, you get no hit.
Jonovono 6y ago
I love Notion, but also agree with all of this. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. (Waiting for this to be released, https://nvultra.com/ https://nvultra.com/)
- sswaner 6y ago
  At quick glance it looks like nvultra is very similar to Bear (https://bear.app https://bear.app). It looks like nvultra's concept of folder based notebooks is an improvement and a nice feature. In Bear I just have every note in reverse chronological order and rely on the excellent search to find what I need. I have been using Bear daily for over 3 years and the features and Markdown support are great. Not affiliated, just a fan/customer.
  - selykg 6y ago
    I _really_ wish Bear had multiple notebooks. I'd love to fully separate work from personal notes for instance. It's not that I can't organize it in a way that makes sense. But if I am not at work, I really don't want to see work. Clear separation of work and home matter a lot when you work from home. The more they blur together the worse it can get. So, I'm stuck using Bear for personal use only because I don't want to contaminate my personal time.
  - Jonovono 6y ago
    Last time I tried Bear there was no global hotkey to quickly launch it to search/take notes. Makes it unusable for a note taking aapp for me.
- jameshe 6y ago
  I remember a while back someone posted an open source alternative [0], the biggest downside being that there are fewer features and must be run locally. Also some of the same problems exist as mentioned in the OP. [0] https://github.com/konstantinmuenster/notion-clone https://github.com/konstantinmuenster/notion-clone
- threatofrain 6y ago
  A lot of note-taking systems promise Latex support, but the import process always bungles my notes. So far only VSC has been simple and nice.
- thex10 6y ago
  I clicked the link out of curiosity wondering if it's based on Notational Velocity (a project which I enjoy!). In case anyone else reading this was wondering about that... I never found an answer (though it does claim to be compatible with the nvALT and Notational Velocity url handlers).
  - cpmsmith 6y ago
    Looks like nvUtra is being co-written by Brett Terpstra, who co-wrote nvALT, along with Fletcher Penny, the author of MultiMarkdown. Star-studded!
- rvieira 6y ago
  How is it different than, say, Obsidian? Just curious since I'm an Obsidian fan/user.
  - jonwest 6y ago
    Was going to also suggest obsidian, it’s been the closest I’ve come to a Notion alternative, aside from the database aspect.
- deckard1 6y ago
  No alternative... to a note taking app? Am I missing something or is everyone crazy here? I use Joplin (with Syncthing) which fits the bill. But I could literally use vim and a folder on my drive. I'm baffled by the productivity "maximizers" on HN. Is this never-ending search for the right tool just an elaborate excuse for procrastination?
  - chrisfosterelli 6y ago
    IMO notion is not a short-form note taking app, and I think it's not ever going to the right app for that use case (though I know lots use it that way anyway). I personally use Keep for most "notes" and notion for "documents". Some of the documents are notes but they're long-form research / project documents.
    - deckard1 6y ago
      again, you can do both of these in vim/Joplin/Obsidian/Google Docs or probably a hundred other tools.
      - chrisfosterelli 6y ago
        Sorry, I should have clarified what I meant by "documents". Notion has a really rich concept of a "document" with deep functionality that other tools typically don't have. For example notion pages can include full markdown in addition to subdocuments, databases, templates, relationships, reminders, galleries, kanban boards, formulas, lists, calendars, timelines, images, videos, web embeds, code snippets, files, maps, tweets, figma views, etc. Where other apps do have some overlap, they typically don't have similar sharing functionality. Notion pages can be private, shared, team-visible, or public on the internet. To more directly compare to your examples: * Vim - No rich document features, no mobile access, no markdown rendering, no sharing. * Joplin - I haven't used this myself but a quick look seems like it has no sharing or team features. * Obsidian - No sharing features. * Google docs - No rich document features. Keep is just a notes app. No argument that alternatives exist there. I like Keep because it works well on android and the web and keeps it simple, but there's definitely other options. FWIW I agree there is alternatives to Notion, in the strictest sense of "alternative". Quip is really close for example. For some use cases (like the article here) you could call Confluence an alternative. But they're just not as flexible or full featured as notion for such a massive variety of use cases across a team. We use notion as a client CRM, project management tool, internal documentation tool, public user guide, discussion space, note app, research log, etc. and there's not really one tool that covers all of those use cases competitively.
- jonwest 6y ago
  You should check out Obsidian.md. It’s been great, and open source.
pictur 6y ago
Complex ui/ux for complex problems I guess is today's fashion
savrajsingh 6y ago
What's the best easy-to-get-started internal company wiki tool? Notion seemed useful at a startup I consulted for, but I too experienced some of the quirks the author mentions.
- Tomte 6y ago
  Dokuwiki is easy to use, easy to administer. But it's a traditional wiki.
- keithnz 6y ago
  We use confluence, which isn't too bad at the moment. I'm not a huge fan, but every time I look for alternatives I can't seem to find anything better and is quite flexible. Also, I now wouldn't consider anything that doesn't have an API as we have made a lot of automations amongst our software management / support tools (our tools are bitbucket, appveyor, octopus deploy, youtrack, confluence, zen desk, discord, and email)
- wim 6y ago
  We built Papyrs for this (https://papyrs.com https://papyrs.com). Would be curious to hear your thoughts on this!
  - lvice 6y ago
    I had a go with a trial account. I like the UI/UX and the site is really fast. Impressive project, and it looks a billion times better than most Sharepoint-based intranets. Good luck!
    - wim 6y ago
      Thanks!
  - savrajsingh 6y ago
    thanks will check out!
- spdegabrielle 6y ago
chrisfrantz 6y ago
Just as a counter, I use Notion personally, for my side projects and at my day job. I haven’t run into any of the same issues the author has had. Most of the comments seem to be rather small compared to the overall use and productivity gains that something like Notion offers.
- OkGoDoIt 6y ago
  A thousand small issues add up to a product that is technically usable, but incredibly frustrating. I tried using notion a couple times, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to use this. Microsoft OneNote was a much better product a decade ago (it hasn’t really improved much since then, but I still prefer it to Notion)
- danpalmer 6y ago
  People value what they are used to. I write code in an editor every day, and I use my editor somewhat deeply, using plenty of shortcuts to manipulate text quickly. When editing text in Notion it feels unproductive because I'm used to a code editor. Someone with a different background may have no problem with the text editing, because they're not used to anything substantially different, but may have an issue with another part. It's great if we can take a step back and see the bigger picture, if there's more productivity overall, but perhaps the things you care about happen to line up with Notion well, where the author's didn't.
  - chrisfrantz 6y ago
    Totally fair, but I wouldn’t expect Notion to work exactly like a code editor. What I do like is they stick to the universal language of “working apps”. So slash commands, markdown support, code snippets, dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, rich embeds, etc. Those are the bare minimum for me, but I don’t think any of their competitors actually have all of these features which is one of the reasons Notion is a good fit for me (and most people that try it).
    - danpalmer 6y ago
      You're right about not being a code editor, but I guess by that I mean that I expect regular text navigation to work flawlessly. Things like alt+arrow keys/holding shift for selections, cmd+up/down for start and end, and the rest. These combinations are often composable for selection, so cmd+shift+up should select to the beginning of the document. These work in my text editor, text fields in every app, Notes, TextEdit, etc, but they often fail in subtle ways in Notion.
skrebbel 6y ago
I don't mind any of these issues to be honest, but I do mind how hopelessly slow it is. Is it also super sluggish for all you SF Bay area people? I can't tell if it's just network latency on a heavy protocol, or just slow slow.
- SwiftyBug 6y ago
  It is indeed very slow. I don't understand why though.
  - 0xCMP 6y ago
    Ha, yea it's slow, but WAY FASTER than it was at launch. I think it's how they cache/request the pages. The slowness is usually in switching pages.
- turtles_ 6y ago
  Agreed, the slowness is especially painful on mobile, which is the exact opposite of what you need from a note taking tool. I use other tools on mobile and copy to notion later which is exactly as convenient as it sounds. I do agree with the thrust of the article too, although I don't find any one UX issue (beyond slowness) a deal-breaker, but together they're collectively a pretty frustrating experience.
  - trinix912 6y ago
    Yeah, it's really slow on the mobile. I rarely ever use Notion for quick notes because it just takes so long to load.
  - jitl 6y ago
    (I work at Notion) The mobile situation was much worse a year ago. We made big start time improvements by removing React Native and rebuilding our caching layer, but we still have a long way to go to beat Apple Notes. Using the Notion widget on iOS can really help with quick access for grocery lists. On Android devices the situation is still not usable.
as-j 6y ago
I moved my team of 6 people to Notion when the company stopped paying for Dropbox Paper and moved to Google Docs. I'm a little taken aback by the tone: > I am an unfortunate user of Notion. I have to use it in my day to day job because it is the tool of my company choice. I suffer every time I'm doing anything in it. I put a good bit of time looking at alternatives to paper that allowed for concurrent editing by multiple people, rich support for technical documentation/code snipits, good tables, fast, etc. Notion isn't perfect, but after going through a dozen offerings it came out far and ahead of all others, especially when you factored in its price. Over the last year they've also really moved ahead with new features, etc. We've moved all our docs and project tracking over to it and now we're fortunately off next-gen Jira. We're a very technical team, and we share our docs rw to the whole company. Out of all the tools we use, I found this one pretty pleasurable to use to be honest.
- tclancy 6y ago
  Same. I don’t have a particular dog in this fight, though I have been playing with Notion, but the idea you came from Confluence and are upset by the UX of Notion is confusing to me. I still don’t understand when which versions of half ass Markdown work when as I swap between Jira ticket bodies, Jira comments and Confluence.
  - as-j 6y ago
    Confluence...I hate you so, it’s just not a competing experience product. But some people _really_ like it. Shrug.
natrik 6y ago
Notion has had some great marketing, and has some useful features, but I don't think its as great as the hype around it suggests. YAWT, Yet Another Writing Tool. To be forgotten? in a few years. When I used it, it seemed like a Jack of All/Master of None type of tool. Seemed like it was focused more on those who enjoy and find value in the act of taking notes rather the value of the note itself. I'm probably not the intended user, but for a lot of daily uses (Meeting notes, TODO lists, etc.) I found a barebones GDocs/Word/Pen and Paper to be more efficient and less taxing to pick up.
Swizec 6y ago
I love Notion and use it lots and every time Cmd+A can’t select the whole document I die a little.
blunte 6y ago
When I read people like or love Notion, I wish I could watch them use it. Obviously they are doing things very differently than I do... Typing latency while writing or editing a page is really high (bad). Every keypress you do, must be going through a long chain of "what can we interpret the user to be wanting ?" questions. Guess what!? The user is probably just trying to fucking type! Special features and options should be hotkey activated, not "smart" default deduced. The afore-mentioned smart typing is 99% wrong or in the way. Typing slash ( / ), for any reason apparently, and in any context, pops up the Basic Blocks selection window. If you type, for example, "10 / 2 = 5", or perhaps "a/b testing", or any other very common valid use of the slash symbol, you are left with that stupid popup on the screen. You have to hit ESC to close it. Pity the fool who has a touchbar Mac. And if for some reason you wanted to end your line with a slash, and you hit return after typing that /, the popup eats the slash and puts you in a new block below. I could go ON and ON with examples. It actually feels like this app was designed for people who only use one finger to type and the other hand driving a mouse all day. Oh one last tidbit. You know how people put icons on buttons and other things to help you identify them quickly, hopefully to make it easier for you to click and get what you want? Notion has a clever fuck you to all those users. If you use the navigation tree panel, and you see the item you want - especially because you quickly recognized its icon - and you click it (the icon), do you get the item you wanted? No, of course not! You get a handy Change Icon popup. Now not only do you not know if you found the item you wanted (since you didn't get to see its associated page), but instead you now have to dismiss that popup. Clicking that icon should have done exactly the same thing as clicking the text beside it: open the damned content associated with that thing. Now, maybe you want to copy a link to that item. How do you do that? That's in the hidden/hover [...] button for the item. That's fair. And that's where the change icon action should be. There's so much wrong with this app that I sometimes wonder if this isn't an enormous practical joke - like the people who write completely nonsensical research papers just to prove how broken the research publishing system is; this joke is for the VCs and the shiny-toy users. /rant
- corobo 6y ago
  This comment is the only one I've read about Notion that I've agreed with. Maybe it's because it was over hyped and other people didn't already have a system in place to compare to or something? I really tried to like Notion but I found it just slowed me down -- as in actually delayed what I was doing with lag and silly things like trying to be clever as you say, not just the learning curve I'm now trying out Obsidian(1) with a plain old directory of md files, but YMMV I never needed the table/db stuff so I dunno if Obsidian has that sort of thing or an equivalent. The directory is mounted from my NAS using its Tailscale(2) IP so it's in theory accessible everywhere, but of course I've not been able to test that much this year (1) https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ (2) https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/ e: I should note I use this for bigger notes. I use blank business cards and a pen to catch ideas, so obsidian's current lack of mobile apps wasn't an issue
austinhutch 6y ago
Love Notion, but the sidebar navigation issue kills me! Notion forces a refresh to update all the time and it collapses all navigation trees. Also hate the favicon changing since I have notes about third parties and I set the page icon to the logo of the third party.
- rfreiberger 6y ago
  I have this issue and my work around is marking my most used pages as "favorites" so they sticky to the top. But it's super annoying when I hit a forced refresh and my location a few levels deep get reset.
- jitl 6y ago
  This bothers me a lot too. Notion refreshes on the next navigation after we deploy an update. We constantly deploy our internal dog food environment - so for me this happens constantly throughout the day. We should try to persist sidebar state like we do for toggle list expand/collapse inside the page.
jitl 6y ago
(Disclaimer: I work on Notion) To me, the most interesting feedback here is that seamless-editable-by-default is a negative for this user, and as a work-around, this organization locks/unlocks every page. This is surprising to me because I find content locks and editing friction very annoying. For example I used Quip for many years, which locks any block currently being edited by someone else, which can be quite frustrating when someone happens to have an idling cursor in a random position. Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs? But it’s an interesting perspective to consider especially for users coming from Confluence, where editing has much more ceremony, and more generally for read-heavy wiki use case. In any case, it’s really the accidental edits at the root of the problem. Like many other commenters, my biggest pain point is page load speed.
- callumlocke 6y ago
  > Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs? Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. I like the way it forces a moment of consideration of what’s there before I dive in. And iterative edit–review–edit cycles help me to keep making macro progress instead of fiddling with irrelevant details. (I’ve not tried Notion though.)
  - jitl 6y ago
    I agree that in touch this makes more sense because edit and scroll use identical inputs (drag finger over document)
  - rad_gruchalski 6y ago
    > Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. Same in google docs mobile app. Edit button in the bottom right corner.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Interesting. I'd like that for Notes.app which is my go-to example for how transparent autosave + always-editable can fail catastrophically. Once I had a very long list in Notes.app that I'd been maintaining over a few years. One day while scrolling it on mobile, I somehow replaced the entire document with some stray input, and by the time I noticed, undo couldn't restore it. Though I was able to recover it because my laptop (which Notes.app will sync to) hadn't yet connected to the internet.
corytheboyd 6y ago
Agree with all points here. This point isn’t Notion’s fault, but subpages are such a trap. I was thrown a product spec drafted with all the Notion bells and whistles, and the details I needed were sprinkled throughout these tiny sub pages. It was a bit ridiculous to navigate as a reader, going back to re-read something was next to impossible. Just put all relevant content in the same place! I somewhat blame Notion for encouraging this, but really it’s up to the author to communicate efficiently.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  What notion really needs is a way to expand subpages within the current page so that you don’t have to navigate to them explicitly.
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    Feels like we could eliminate the middleman here... :p
CoachRufus87 6y ago
Can we just get 2fa?
- gravity13 6y ago
  Wait, you mean you're an enterprise company and using email for login everyday isn't a viable option for you? (clearly Notion is too cool for people like us to use...)
ljm 6y ago
Aside from accidental edits (which can result in a lot of confusion if you're trying to use a page as a template, as it will go ahead and update every other page using it), the email notifications are beyond useless if you don't read your email through gmail or whatever. They don't render properly at all in the Mail app on Windows. I don't really use the rest of it. I think they're trying to be too fancy and it starts to break down when working in larger teams. You'll still go back to a good old fashioned word processor for anything important.
alvarlagerlof 6y ago
I haven't used it extensively, and I haven't used the collaboration features at all, but for me a few things make me dread the opening it at all. - The performance. Just awful on my MacBook that this a couple years old (read, nothing extreme at all). It's of course better on my shiny new desktop but fundamentally, it's been slow there too. - Tables. If performance was tolerable elsewhere, tables are not. Everything is 2x slower. Wouldn't even think of attempting to use them on my phone (which also isn't old) - Where are my billing setting on the app? Nowhere to be seen. And not on the website either, unless I go into desktop mode. I was thinking it was free for a couple months because I couldn't find the settings. - Launch time. Don't get me started. When I used it i tried to never close it to avoid the launch times. In the end I switched over the list-stuff to Todoist which had served me good, but it's of course missing the whole smart doc thing. I really don't understand if the devs all have beast machines or if they just don't care about performance at all. I'm not trying the product again in a while.
rkangel 6y ago
I love Notion, but the editing issues hit home for me. Specifically the pgup/dn, ctrl+a navigation things. Ctrl+a works in every text editing context ever, that it suddenly means 'this paragraph only' gets me every time. I'd love for these to be fixed and the performance to be improved, but Notion is a great tool. We ran our whole startup on it, and I recommend it to everyone.
reffaelwallen 6y ago
I have been using Notion for 3-4 years now. There is nothing better IMO. It is slow at times, it has a lot of its power hidden behind the "/", and it's not very helpful of you need advanced governance (like locking multiple pages easily). But it is great in any other way, personally I am waiting for the API and table grouping features to make it really great, and I could stop using aitrable.
- reffaelwallen 6y ago
  (Notion give me table grouping please!!)
  - jitl 6y ago
    I miss board grouping from JIRA
scrapcode 6y ago
A lot of these complaints seem to take me back many years - when I still worked in tech as a profession. Mainly because they are the same frustrations with decades-old attempts at creating a WYSIWYG that is remotely successful. It is interesting to see that this space is still difficult to solve.
polote 6y ago
What is different between Notion and Google drive except Notion is sexy?
- danpalmer 6y ago
  The main difference is that Google Drive is essentially a traditional office suite on a traditional filesystem structure, while Notion is more like a wiki with rich document components like embedded databases. There's a lot of overlap on what some companies might use each for, I use both for different things at work. I've found that Notion's strengths for us are when we have a collection of documents that all need to follow roughly the same structure, and we can build a mini database for them - things like blog post drafts for the company blog, RFCs, incident post-mortems, etc. On Google Drive this would be a folder of docs and a template maybe? Not searchable/sortable in the same way. Or it might be a spreadsheet with links in? But that might not be great. I could also imagine it working well for task management in small companies/teams. I don't think Drive has a good equivalent for this.
npunt 6y ago
I tried writing one of these laundry lists of how screwy and frustrating Notion's UX is, from the information architecture (mixing page, project, account, and presentation options) to the writing experience/feel to the weird block-centricity... and I just gave up in frustration. The conclusion I came to is if you're going to remake and extend the word processor, you must take the lessons of the last 40 years to heart. There are in-built expectations for word processors, including keyboard commands, selection & cursors, speed, permanence & permission, etc, and Notion violates many of them for no good reason. The result is an unpleasurable writing environment. That should have been the easiest thing to get right, the foundation upon which amazing new features are built. I use Notion for a few things, mostly because existing tools have yet to move from document-centric to project-centric designs, but it is not a tool that I would foist on the average user nor one I especially enjoy using. So much potential is held back by bad UX, which I think a lot of people don't see because Notion does have good graphic design and a few really stellar capabilities. My impression is the team has probably concluded their rapid growth is a validation of the UX, rather than other positive factors of Notion, namely being the first halfway decent project-centric editor. Hoping they do a UX refactor soon.
- jitl 6y ago
  (I work at Notion) We didn’t conclude anything as a validation of our UX - there is nothing in Notion that we consider “ideal” or even “finished”; we are painfully aware of how far we still have to go. There is just a lot of work to do for our small (but growing!) team.
  - npunt 6y ago
    Thanks for responding. I imagine many things are growing and changing there, and it's great to hear the team retains that kind of humility and self awareness. In our industry it's pretty common for companies to let success get to their heads and not do the kind of critical examination necessary to overcome the momentum of early missteps or treat early temporary decisions as permanent. Having run product/design for a few startups I'm extra aware of this since I've been guilty of it myself. I think the part of Notion that most gives me this impression is the information architecture, which can be an extremely difficult thing to change once a significant number of users get to know a particular layout, and hasn't meaningfully changed since launch. Of all the writing tools I use, Notion's IA has always been the least straightforward. Between the '...' menu and the Settings & members section, as well as several options like favorite, share, updates, and options on the sidebar, there's a lack of clear hierarchy and separation between account, workspace, page, or presentation options. This lack of clear hierarchy, combined with some product choices that apply at an unexpected level of hierarchy or permission model, means many actions exact capabilities are unclear or violate expectations of where they apply - account v workspace, workspace v page, and all users v me. Take the top bar for example. From left to right: 1. Breadcrumbs: workspace & page 2. Share: workspace-specific (where can I share just an individual page? why is this separate from Copy Link?) 3. Updates: page-specific 4. Favorite: page-specific that either applies to the workspace or is a personal favorite (unclear, given "favorites" typically = personal, while "pin" = others see it) 5. '...' Menu: contains mostly page options with a few workspace ones (e.g. Import, possibly Export?). I even got confused about whether style options are personal (e.g my reading preference for font) or apply to the page style, given many writing tools allow this kind of style configurability as a user setting. There's also duplication of options around the UI including Import, Favorite, Move To, New Page and Updates (how is this different than Page History?), which further leads to confusion about where to take what kind of action and clutter the interface. The sidebar mostly makes sense as its all workspace-related. However, new users are likely to get tripped up on the difference between workspace name/icon and the root page name/icon, but this is a minor point. Over in the Settings & Members section, you also have a mix of options that don't really meet expectations. The menu itself is launched from the sidebar, where workspace options are, but the menu also contains account settings, which is higher up in the hierarchy. As far as product choices, one would expect notifications and connected apps to be workspace-based, as they are in other popular collaboration tools that use the same workspace patterns (like Slack/Discord), given that some workspaces I want to be watching closely or use particular accounts and others I don't. But these are instead account-based. Logging in and out of workspaces is also in an entirely different section (the workspace picker), which is quite different from most apps where you tap your user icon and make account choices. Also in Settings & Members is Dark mode, floating on its own not even under account settings. Are there other personal presentation options? What if I have accessibility needs or want a bigger reading font? The overall impression I have of Notion's IA is that it minimizes UI footprint to a point of lack of clarity and that its structure is buckling under a heavy feature load. This is a signal of graphic design having priority over UX. Rather than express clear hierarchies in layout, they're bundled together to save a bit of space (e.g. topbar) or to minimize the number of maintained pages (e.g. a dedicated Home / workspace page, account management page, global activity page, etc). These are the types of things that bite back quickly as you scale features and expand audiences. For an example of a product that really nails information architecture, look at Trello. It's got a really clean UI separation between the hierarchies of cross-Board features (top nav), within-Board (sub nav), List (main canvas), and Card (modal). You always know where to find each action and what each does in their context. Coda is also halfway decent, if a bit feature-rich and ugly. I also wrote about my own experience refactoring OneSignal's IA to manage future feature growth here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/when-to-add-hierarchy/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/when-to-add-hierarchy/
coldtea 6y ago
>This one is a real shame. I still can't believe it. If you select any text block, you can't navigate using Page Up and Page Down keys. So? That's probably used by less than 5% of people anyway. Seeing regular users most would just use the mouse...
- g7r 6y ago
  5% is a lot! But even if it wasn't, it is not a proper justification for breaking basic things.
- krsdcbl 6y ago
  No gain for 95% and a loss for 5% seems like an even worse outcome of changing default behaviour
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Only if you don't take into account opportunity cost. You assume here that they've actively worked to change default behavior, but it is probably a zero-work-required by product of the widget they used (that gives them other capabilities thet do want) and to (a) revert to plain HTML textareas would remove this, (b) to add the default behavior to their widget would take extra effort.
tracyhenry 6y ago
I had to stop reading after the first three bullet points. Maybe the rest is reasonable, but first... When sharing to colleagues you get to choose if you allow them to edit/comment/view. That, to be honest, is the first thing I check when I share docs (be it Google Docs, Quip or Notion). I won't rely on the defaults of the software because it's too costly to not get it right. Second, you don't have to lock the document. As long as you disallow editing, you as the owner of the document still can edit the document. Am I missing something? Third, notifications shoot as soon as you enter colleague names. I get this might be annoying at first. But don't many great UX stuff need some kind of getting-used-to? When switching from Windows to OSX, I was shocked that you get to rename a folder when you hit ENTER, rather than open it. Guess what? I got used to it. I have my alternative to opening a folder and it's not slower. In this notification case I'd then just see entering the colleague names as the last step. Problem solved. All the first three bullet points are not inherent bad UX issues "built into the DNA" as claimed by OP. Notion is great. It's more powerful Google Docs and easy to use in general. The article is written in a way as if the author has not had any positive experiences from using Notion. That's unfortunate.
- SCLeo 6y ago
  OP does not want to disallow their colleagues from a editing a page altogether. They want to prevent accidental edits.
  - tracyhenry 6y ago
    I think it's apparent that OP wants to disallow editing but allow commenting (see quotes down below). Notion provides exactly this feature when you share a doc but OP seems to have missed it and instead uses "lock a document" to do what he wants, which created all the problems in the first two sections. This feature is easy to find and is similar to what Google docs offers and so fairly learnable. > First thing you learn when getting used to Notion is that every page you share should be locked from editing! > The next problem with edit lock is that you can't unlock the page just for you. So you are a good user of Notion and keep all pages locked from editing. But every time you want to modify a page, you unlock it and everyone can (unintentionally) modify it while you're editing. > Adding or editing content isn't the only case when you need your page to be unlocked. It is impossible to add comments on locked page. ^^^ These quotes are all wrong. You don't lock your document. When you share a doc, configure the access rights (edit/comment/view only, similar to what you do when sharing a Google doc).
Solvitieg 6y ago
I see comments in this HN thread about word processors and agile development and I'm thinking... isn't Notion a tool to take notes?
- busrf 6y ago
  Some of the problem here is that people have many different use cases for Notion: personal note taking, project management, collaborative text editor, and company knowledge base. Notion markets itself as a general tool that can fulfill each of those use cases. As a result it is hard for them to come up with UX that fits everyone. Some of the things people are saying here that they can’t stand about Notion are some of the things that I like the most about it, and some of the improvements people are suggesting here are things that would make me abandon Notion if they changed it to be in line with what they suggest, and I think a lot of that is from difference in expected use case (I use it as a personal knowledge base) It is definitely a weakness of their product.
camgunz 6y ago
SWEs don't like Notion. Non-SWEs think it's above average. I legitimately use markdown in Vim and paste pages into Notion pages and, surprise surprise, I'm a lot more productive than people who don't do that. But Notion beats Google Docs--its chief competitor--for non-SWEs, so here we are. I feel like a good solution here is to let eng teams use a different tool.
shash7 6y ago
I've been building complex UIs since early this year and one thing that's been interesting is that whenever I add a feature which performs an action automatically for the user(let's call this a smart action), it almost always backfires. Generally speaking, people like their actions to be predictible, reproductive and deterministic. Whenever an app trys to add smart actions in the hopes of making the UI more responsive, it has the opposite reaction. Notion seems like one of those tools that relies on a lot of background smart actions. Not that I mind too much, I'm a big fan actually.
derekhsu 6y ago
I agree, but from my point of view, Notion's UI and UX are still way better than other platform such as Evernote. In addition, they are willing to accept suggestion such as modification of mobile app which is really positively changed after many complains.
theanirudh 6y ago
Dropbox Paper has the best editing experience. Notion should try to emulate that.
alphachloride 6y ago
This is the first time I paid attention to notion. Tangentially a UX issue - I find applications that save my data in the cloud by default less "weighty". Can't explain it rationally. It just feels that those documents are less permanent, secure, accessible, and "mine" than a file I can save to disk.
fomine3 6y ago
I'd like to say thank you for Notion team to support proper work with IME (at least for Japanese, Win/Linux/Android) from at least 1.5 years ago. SPA apps made by English speaker tend to have broken input field (Even twitter's tweet field) but Notion isn't even though it has complex features.
nojvek 6y ago
Notion has annoying UX, but compared to Atlassian Confluence or Dropbox Paper it’s better. Confluence is just awfully slow to load. Every little thing takes forever. Dropbox Paper feels like someone’s weekend project. It is so subpar and things seem to have bolted on without much thought. There’s still a lot to figure out when making a good intuitive knowledge base.
nojvek 6y ago
I did some perf profiling on Notion. Their JS just takes a long time to do basic things (even interpreting keystrokes) Seeing VSCode (which is a web tool) respond insanely fast for keystrokes and code completion makes me realize (amongst Microsoft products, Vscode is a gem - they’ve done a rare thing which is to make a complex performant web app that does editing really well)

210 points by g7r 6y ago

fnl 6y ago

My main reason for not using Notion is that its search is half-baked: You cannot search for headlines and body content in a single query. Say if you query for "H B", and H is only in the headline, while B is only in the body, you get no hit.

Jonovono 6y ago

I love Notion, but also agree with all of this. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. (Waiting for this to be released, https://nvultra.com/ https://nvultra.com/)

sswaner 6y ago
At quick glance it looks like nvultra is very similar to Bear (https://bear.app https://bear.app). It looks like nvultra's concept of folder based notebooks is an improvement and a nice feature. In Bear I just have every note in reverse chronological order and rely on the excellent search to find what I need. I have been using Bear daily for over 3 years and the features and Markdown support are great. Not affiliated, just a fan/customer.
- selykg 6y ago
  I _really_ wish Bear had multiple notebooks. I'd love to fully separate work from personal notes for instance. It's not that I can't organize it in a way that makes sense. But if I am not at work, I really don't want to see work. Clear separation of work and home matter a lot when you work from home. The more they blur together the worse it can get. So, I'm stuck using Bear for personal use only because I don't want to contaminate my personal time.
- Jonovono 6y ago
  Last time I tried Bear there was no global hotkey to quickly launch it to search/take notes. Makes it unusable for a note taking aapp for me.
jameshe 6y ago
I remember a while back someone posted an open source alternative [0], the biggest downside being that there are fewer features and must be run locally. Also some of the same problems exist as mentioned in the OP. [0] https://github.com/konstantinmuenster/notion-clone https://github.com/konstantinmuenster/notion-clone
threatofrain 6y ago
A lot of note-taking systems promise Latex support, but the import process always bungles my notes. So far only VSC has been simple and nice.
thex10 6y ago
I clicked the link out of curiosity wondering if it's based on Notational Velocity (a project which I enjoy!). In case anyone else reading this was wondering about that... I never found an answer (though it does claim to be compatible with the nvALT and Notational Velocity url handlers).
- cpmsmith 6y ago
  Looks like nvUtra is being co-written by Brett Terpstra, who co-wrote nvALT, along with Fletcher Penny, the author of MultiMarkdown. Star-studded!
rvieira 6y ago
How is it different than, say, Obsidian? Just curious since I'm an Obsidian fan/user.
- jonwest 6y ago
  Was going to also suggest obsidian, it’s been the closest I’ve come to a Notion alternative, aside from the database aspect.
deckard1 6y ago
No alternative... to a note taking app? Am I missing something or is everyone crazy here? I use Joplin (with Syncthing) which fits the bill. But I could literally use vim and a folder on my drive. I'm baffled by the productivity "maximizers" on HN. Is this never-ending search for the right tool just an elaborate excuse for procrastination?
- chrisfosterelli 6y ago
  IMO notion is not a short-form note taking app, and I think it's not ever going to the right app for that use case (though I know lots use it that way anyway). I personally use Keep for most "notes" and notion for "documents". Some of the documents are notes but they're long-form research / project documents.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    again, you can do both of these in vim/Joplin/Obsidian/Google Docs or probably a hundred other tools.
    - chrisfosterelli 6y ago
      Sorry, I should have clarified what I meant by "documents". Notion has a really rich concept of a "document" with deep functionality that other tools typically don't have. For example notion pages can include full markdown in addition to subdocuments, databases, templates, relationships, reminders, galleries, kanban boards, formulas, lists, calendars, timelines, images, videos, web embeds, code snippets, files, maps, tweets, figma views, etc. Where other apps do have some overlap, they typically don't have similar sharing functionality. Notion pages can be private, shared, team-visible, or public on the internet. To more directly compare to your examples: * Vim - No rich document features, no mobile access, no markdown rendering, no sharing. * Joplin - I haven't used this myself but a quick look seems like it has no sharing or team features. * Obsidian - No sharing features. * Google docs - No rich document features. Keep is just a notes app. No argument that alternatives exist there. I like Keep because it works well on android and the web and keeps it simple, but there's definitely other options. FWIW I agree there is alternatives to Notion, in the strictest sense of "alternative". Quip is really close for example. For some use cases (like the article here) you could call Confluence an alternative. But they're just not as flexible or full featured as notion for such a massive variety of use cases across a team. We use notion as a client CRM, project management tool, internal documentation tool, public user guide, discussion space, note app, research log, etc. and there's not really one tool that covers all of those use cases competitively.
jonwest 6y ago
You should check out Obsidian.md. It’s been great, and open source.

pictur 6y ago

Complex ui/ux for complex problems I guess is today's fashion

savrajsingh 6y ago

What's the best easy-to-get-started internal company wiki tool? Notion seemed useful at a startup I consulted for, but I too experienced some of the quirks the author mentions.

Tomte 6y ago
Dokuwiki is easy to use, easy to administer. But it's a traditional wiki.
keithnz 6y ago
We use confluence, which isn't too bad at the moment. I'm not a huge fan, but every time I look for alternatives I can't seem to find anything better and is quite flexible. Also, I now wouldn't consider anything that doesn't have an API as we have made a lot of automations amongst our software management / support tools (our tools are bitbucket, appveyor, octopus deploy, youtrack, confluence, zen desk, discord, and email)
wim 6y ago
We built Papyrs for this (https://papyrs.com https://papyrs.com). Would be curious to hear your thoughts on this!
- lvice 6y ago
  I had a go with a trial account. I like the UI/UX and the site is really fast. Impressive project, and it looks a billion times better than most Sharepoint-based intranets. Good luck!
  - wim 6y ago
    Thanks!
- savrajsingh 6y ago
  thanks will check out!
spdegabrielle 6y ago

chrisfrantz 6y ago

Just as a counter, I use Notion personally, for my side projects and at my day job. I haven’t run into any of the same issues the author has had. Most of the comments seem to be rather small compared to the overall use and productivity gains that something like Notion offers.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago
A thousand small issues add up to a product that is technically usable, but incredibly frustrating. I tried using notion a couple times, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to use this. Microsoft OneNote was a much better product a decade ago (it hasn’t really improved much since then, but I still prefer it to Notion)
danpalmer 6y ago
People value what they are used to. I write code in an editor every day, and I use my editor somewhat deeply, using plenty of shortcuts to manipulate text quickly. When editing text in Notion it feels unproductive because I'm used to a code editor. Someone with a different background may have no problem with the text editing, because they're not used to anything substantially different, but may have an issue with another part. It's great if we can take a step back and see the bigger picture, if there's more productivity overall, but perhaps the things you care about happen to line up with Notion well, where the author's didn't.
- chrisfrantz 6y ago
  Totally fair, but I wouldn’t expect Notion to work exactly like a code editor. What I do like is they stick to the universal language of “working apps”. So slash commands, markdown support, code snippets, dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, rich embeds, etc. Those are the bare minimum for me, but I don’t think any of their competitors actually have all of these features which is one of the reasons Notion is a good fit for me (and most people that try it).
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    You're right about not being a code editor, but I guess by that I mean that I expect regular text navigation to work flawlessly. Things like alt+arrow keys/holding shift for selections, cmd+up/down for start and end, and the rest. These combinations are often composable for selection, so cmd+shift+up should select to the beginning of the document. These work in my text editor, text fields in every app, Notes, TextEdit, etc, but they often fail in subtle ways in Notion.

skrebbel 6y ago

I don't mind any of these issues to be honest, but I do mind how hopelessly slow it is. Is it also super sluggish for all you SF Bay area people? I can't tell if it's just network latency on a heavy protocol, or just slow slow.

SwiftyBug 6y ago
It is indeed very slow. I don't understand why though.
- 0xCMP 6y ago
  Ha, yea it's slow, but WAY FASTER than it was at launch. I think it's how they cache/request the pages. The slowness is usually in switching pages.
turtles_ 6y ago
Agreed, the slowness is especially painful on mobile, which is the exact opposite of what you need from a note taking tool. I use other tools on mobile and copy to notion later which is exactly as convenient as it sounds. I do agree with the thrust of the article too, although I don't find any one UX issue (beyond slowness) a deal-breaker, but together they're collectively a pretty frustrating experience.
- trinix912 6y ago
  Yeah, it's really slow on the mobile. I rarely ever use Notion for quick notes because it just takes so long to load.
- jitl 6y ago
  (I work at Notion) The mobile situation was much worse a year ago. We made big start time improvements by removing React Native and rebuilding our caching layer, but we still have a long way to go to beat Apple Notes. Using the Notion widget on iOS can really help with quick access for grocery lists. On Android devices the situation is still not usable.

as-j 6y ago

I moved my team of 6 people to Notion when the company stopped paying for Dropbox Paper and moved to Google Docs. I'm a little taken aback by the tone: > I am an unfortunate user of Notion. I have to use it in my day to day job because it is the tool of my company choice. I suffer every time I'm doing anything in it. I put a good bit of time looking at alternatives to paper that allowed for concurrent editing by multiple people, rich support for technical documentation/code snipits, good tables, fast, etc. Notion isn't perfect, but after going through a dozen offerings it came out far and ahead of all others, especially when you factored in its price. Over the last year they've also really moved ahead with new features, etc. We've moved all our docs and project tracking over to it and now we're fortunately off next-gen Jira. We're a very technical team, and we share our docs rw to the whole company. Out of all the tools we use, I found this one pretty pleasurable to use to be honest.

tclancy 6y ago
Same. I don’t have a particular dog in this fight, though I have been playing with Notion, but the idea you came from Confluence and are upset by the UX of Notion is confusing to me. I still don’t understand when which versions of half ass Markdown work when as I swap between Jira ticket bodies, Jira comments and Confluence.
- as-j 6y ago
  Confluence...I hate you so, it’s just not a competing experience product. But some people _really_ like it. Shrug.

natrik 6y ago

Notion has had some great marketing, and has some useful features, but I don't think its as great as the hype around it suggests. YAWT, Yet Another Writing Tool. To be forgotten? in a few years. When I used it, it seemed like a Jack of All/Master of None type of tool. Seemed like it was focused more on those who enjoy and find value in the act of taking notes rather the value of the note itself. I'm probably not the intended user, but for a lot of daily uses (Meeting notes, TODO lists, etc.) I found a barebones GDocs/Word/Pen and Paper to be more efficient and less taxing to pick up.

Swizec 6y ago

I love Notion and use it lots and every time Cmd+A can’t select the whole document I die a little.

blunte 6y ago

When I read people like or love Notion, I wish I could watch them use it. Obviously they are doing things very differently than I do... Typing latency while writing or editing a page is really high (bad). Every keypress you do, must be going through a long chain of "what can we interpret the user to be wanting ?" questions. Guess what!? The user is probably just trying to fucking type! Special features and options should be hotkey activated, not "smart" default deduced. The afore-mentioned smart typing is 99% wrong or in the way. Typing slash ( / ), for any reason apparently, and in any context, pops up the Basic Blocks selection window. If you type, for example, "10 / 2 = 5", or perhaps "a/b testing", or any other very common valid use of the slash symbol, you are left with that stupid popup on the screen. You have to hit ESC to close it. Pity the fool who has a touchbar Mac. And if for some reason you wanted to end your line with a slash, and you hit return after typing that /, the popup eats the slash and puts you in a new block below. I could go ON and ON with examples. It actually feels like this app was designed for people who only use one finger to type and the other hand driving a mouse all day. Oh one last tidbit. You know how people put icons on buttons and other things to help you identify them quickly, hopefully to make it easier for you to click and get what you want? Notion has a clever fuck you to all those users. If you use the navigation tree panel, and you see the item you want - especially because you quickly recognized its icon - and you click it (the icon), do you get the item you wanted? No, of course not! You get a handy Change Icon popup. Now not only do you not know if you found the item you wanted (since you didn't get to see its associated page), but instead you now have to dismiss that popup. Clicking that icon should have done exactly the same thing as clicking the text beside it: open the damned content associated with that thing. Now, maybe you want to copy a link to that item. How do you do that? That's in the hidden/hover [...] button for the item. That's fair. And that's where the change icon action should be. There's so much wrong with this app that I sometimes wonder if this isn't an enormous practical joke - like the people who write completely nonsensical research papers just to prove how broken the research publishing system is; this joke is for the VCs and the shiny-toy users. /rant

corobo 6y ago
This comment is the only one I've read about Notion that I've agreed with. Maybe it's because it was over hyped and other people didn't already have a system in place to compare to or something? I really tried to like Notion but I found it just slowed me down -- as in actually delayed what I was doing with lag and silly things like trying to be clever as you say, not just the learning curve I'm now trying out Obsidian(1) with a plain old directory of md files, but YMMV I never needed the table/db stuff so I dunno if Obsidian has that sort of thing or an equivalent. The directory is mounted from my NAS using its Tailscale(2) IP so it's in theory accessible everywhere, but of course I've not been able to test that much this year (1) https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ (2) https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/ e: I should note I use this for bigger notes. I use blank business cards and a pen to catch ideas, so obsidian's current lack of mobile apps wasn't an issue

austinhutch 6y ago

Love Notion, but the sidebar navigation issue kills me! Notion forces a refresh to update all the time and it collapses all navigation trees. Also hate the favicon changing since I have notes about third parties and I set the page icon to the logo of the third party.

rfreiberger 6y ago
I have this issue and my work around is marking my most used pages as "favorites" so they sticky to the top. But it's super annoying when I hit a forced refresh and my location a few levels deep get reset.
jitl 6y ago
This bothers me a lot too. Notion refreshes on the next navigation after we deploy an update. We constantly deploy our internal dog food environment - so for me this happens constantly throughout the day. We should try to persist sidebar state like we do for toggle list expand/collapse inside the page.

jitl 6y ago

(Disclaimer: I work on Notion) To me, the most interesting feedback here is that seamless-editable-by-default is a negative for this user, and as a work-around, this organization locks/unlocks every page. This is surprising to me because I find content locks and editing friction very annoying. For example I used Quip for many years, which locks any block currently being edited by someone else, which can be quite frustrating when someone happens to have an idling cursor in a random position. Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs? But it’s an interesting perspective to consider especially for users coming from Confluence, where editing has much more ceremony, and more generally for read-heavy wiki use case. In any case, it’s really the accidental edits at the root of the problem. Like many other commenters, my biggest pain point is page load speed.

callumlocke 6y ago
> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs? Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. I like the way it forces a moment of consideration of what’s there before I dive in. And iterative edit–review–edit cycles help me to keep making macro progress instead of fiddling with irrelevant details. (I’ve not tried Notion though.)
- jitl 6y ago
  I agree that in touch this makes more sense because edit and scroll use identical inputs (drag finger over document)
- rad_gruchalski 6y ago
  > Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. Same in google docs mobile app. Edit button in the bottom right corner.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Interesting. I'd like that for Notes.app which is my go-to example for how transparent autosave + always-editable can fail catastrophically. Once I had a very long list in Notes.app that I'd been maintaining over a few years. One day while scrolling it on mobile, I somehow replaced the entire document with some stray input, and by the time I noticed, undo couldn't restore it. Though I was able to recover it because my laptop (which Notes.app will sync to) hadn't yet connected to the internet.

corytheboyd 6y ago

Agree with all points here. This point isn’t Notion’s fault, but subpages are such a trap. I was thrown a product spec drafted with all the Notion bells and whistles, and the details I needed were sprinkled throughout these tiny sub pages. It was a bit ridiculous to navigate as a reader, going back to re-read something was next to impossible. Just put all relevant content in the same place! I somewhat blame Notion for encouraging this, but really it’s up to the author to communicate efficiently.

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
What notion really needs is a way to expand subpages within the current page so that you don’t have to navigate to them explicitly.
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  Feels like we could eliminate the middleman here... :p

CoachRufus87 6y ago

Can we just get 2fa?

gravity13 6y ago
Wait, you mean you're an enterprise company and using email for login everyday isn't a viable option for you? (clearly Notion is too cool for people like us to use...)

ljm 6y ago

Aside from accidental edits (which can result in a lot of confusion if you're trying to use a page as a template, as it will go ahead and update every other page using it), the email notifications are beyond useless if you don't read your email through gmail or whatever. They don't render properly at all in the Mail app on Windows. I don't really use the rest of it. I think they're trying to be too fancy and it starts to break down when working in larger teams. You'll still go back to a good old fashioned word processor for anything important.

alvarlagerlof 6y ago

I haven't used it extensively, and I haven't used the collaboration features at all, but for me a few things make me dread the opening it at all. - The performance. Just awful on my MacBook that this a couple years old (read, nothing extreme at all). It's of course better on my shiny new desktop but fundamentally, it's been slow there too. - Tables. If performance was tolerable elsewhere, tables are not. Everything is 2x slower. Wouldn't even think of attempting to use them on my phone (which also isn't old) - Where are my billing setting on the app? Nowhere to be seen. And not on the website either, unless I go into desktop mode. I was thinking it was free for a couple months because I couldn't find the settings. - Launch time. Don't get me started. When I used it i tried to never close it to avoid the launch times. In the end I switched over the list-stuff to Todoist which had served me good, but it's of course missing the whole smart doc thing. I really don't understand if the devs all have beast machines or if they just don't care about performance at all. I'm not trying the product again in a while.

rkangel 6y ago

I love Notion, but the editing issues hit home for me. Specifically the pgup/dn, ctrl+a navigation things. Ctrl+a works in every text editing context ever, that it suddenly means 'this paragraph only' gets me every time. I'd love for these to be fixed and the performance to be improved, but Notion is a great tool. We ran our whole startup on it, and I recommend it to everyone.

reffaelwallen 6y ago

I have been using Notion for 3-4 years now. There is nothing better IMO. It is slow at times, it has a lot of its power hidden behind the "/", and it's not very helpful of you need advanced governance (like locking multiple pages easily). But it is great in any other way, personally I am waiting for the API and table grouping features to make it really great, and I could stop using aitrable.

reffaelwallen 6y ago
(Notion give me table grouping please!!)
- jitl 6y ago
  I miss board grouping from JIRA

scrapcode 6y ago

A lot of these complaints seem to take me back many years - when I still worked in tech as a profession. Mainly because they are the same frustrations with decades-old attempts at creating a WYSIWYG that is remotely successful. It is interesting to see that this space is still difficult to solve.

polote 6y ago

What is different between Notion and Google drive except Notion is sexy?

danpalmer 6y ago
The main difference is that Google Drive is essentially a traditional office suite on a traditional filesystem structure, while Notion is more like a wiki with rich document components like embedded databases. There's a lot of overlap on what some companies might use each for, I use both for different things at work. I've found that Notion's strengths for us are when we have a collection of documents that all need to follow roughly the same structure, and we can build a mini database for them - things like blog post drafts for the company blog, RFCs, incident post-mortems, etc. On Google Drive this would be a folder of docs and a template maybe? Not searchable/sortable in the same way. Or it might be a spreadsheet with links in? But that might not be great. I could also imagine it working well for task management in small companies/teams. I don't think Drive has a good equivalent for this.

npunt 6y ago

I tried writing one of these laundry lists of how screwy and frustrating Notion's UX is, from the information architecture (mixing page, project, account, and presentation options) to the writing experience/feel to the weird block-centricity... and I just gave up in frustration. The conclusion I came to is if you're going to remake and extend the word processor, you must take the lessons of the last 40 years to heart. There are in-built expectations for word processors, including keyboard commands, selection & cursors, speed, permanence & permission, etc, and Notion violates many of them for no good reason. The result is an unpleasurable writing environment. That should have been the easiest thing to get right, the foundation upon which amazing new features are built. I use Notion for a few things, mostly because existing tools have yet to move from document-centric to project-centric designs, but it is not a tool that I would foist on the average user nor one I especially enjoy using. So much potential is held back by bad UX, which I think a lot of people don't see because Notion does have good graphic design and a few really stellar capabilities. My impression is the team has probably concluded their rapid growth is a validation of the UX, rather than other positive factors of Notion, namely being the first halfway decent project-centric editor. Hoping they do a UX refactor soon.

jitl 6y ago
(I work at Notion) We didn’t conclude anything as a validation of our UX - there is nothing in Notion that we consider “ideal” or even “finished”; we are painfully aware of how far we still have to go. There is just a lot of work to do for our small (but growing!) team.
- npunt 6y ago
  Thanks for responding. I imagine many things are growing and changing there, and it's great to hear the team retains that kind of humility and self awareness. In our industry it's pretty common for companies to let success get to their heads and not do the kind of critical examination necessary to overcome the momentum of early missteps or treat early temporary decisions as permanent. Having run product/design for a few startups I'm extra aware of this since I've been guilty of it myself. I think the part of Notion that most gives me this impression is the information architecture, which can be an extremely difficult thing to change once a significant number of users get to know a particular layout, and hasn't meaningfully changed since launch. Of all the writing tools I use, Notion's IA has always been the least straightforward. Between the '...' menu and the Settings & members section, as well as several options like favorite, share, updates, and options on the sidebar, there's a lack of clear hierarchy and separation between account, workspace, page, or presentation options. This lack of clear hierarchy, combined with some product choices that apply at an unexpected level of hierarchy or permission model, means many actions exact capabilities are unclear or violate expectations of where they apply - account v workspace, workspace v page, and all users v me. Take the top bar for example. From left to right: 1. Breadcrumbs: workspace & page 2. Share: workspace-specific (where can I share just an individual page? why is this separate from Copy Link?) 3. Updates: page-specific 4. Favorite: page-specific that either applies to the workspace or is a personal favorite (unclear, given "favorites" typically = personal, while "pin" = others see it) 5. '...' Menu: contains mostly page options with a few workspace ones (e.g. Import, possibly Export?). I even got confused about whether style options are personal (e.g my reading preference for font) or apply to the page style, given many writing tools allow this kind of style configurability as a user setting. There's also duplication of options around the UI including Import, Favorite, Move To, New Page and Updates (how is this different than Page History?), which further leads to confusion about where to take what kind of action and clutter the interface. The sidebar mostly makes sense as its all workspace-related. However, new users are likely to get tripped up on the difference between workspace name/icon and the root page name/icon, but this is a minor point. Over in the Settings & Members section, you also have a mix of options that don't really meet expectations. The menu itself is launched from the sidebar, where workspace options are, but the menu also contains account settings, which is higher up in the hierarchy. As far as product choices, one would expect notifications and connected apps to be workspace-based, as they are in other popular collaboration tools that use the same workspace patterns (like Slack/Discord), given that some workspaces I want to be watching closely or use particular accounts and others I don't. But these are instead account-based. Logging in and out of workspaces is also in an entirely different section (the workspace picker), which is quite different from most apps where you tap your user icon and make account choices. Also in Settings & Members is Dark mode, floating on its own not even under account settings. Are there other personal presentation options? What if I have accessibility needs or want a bigger reading font? The overall impression I have of Notion's IA is that it minimizes UI footprint to a point of lack of clarity and that its structure is buckling under a heavy feature load. This is a signal of graphic design having priority over UX. Rather than express clear hierarchies in layout, they're bundled together to save a bit of space (e.g. topbar) or to minimize the number of maintained pages (e.g. a dedicated Home / workspace page, account management page, global activity page, etc). These are the types of things that bite back quickly as you scale features and expand audiences. For an example of a product that really nails information architecture, look at Trello. It's got a really clean UI separation between the hierarchies of cross-Board features (top nav), within-Board (sub nav), List (main canvas), and Card (modal). You always know where to find each action and what each does in their context. Coda is also halfway decent, if a bit feature-rich and ugly. I also wrote about my own experience refactoring OneSignal's IA to manage future feature growth here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/when-to-add-hierarchy/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/when-to-add-hierarchy/

coldtea 6y ago

>This one is a real shame. I still can't believe it. If you select any text block, you can't navigate using Page Up and Page Down keys. So? That's probably used by less than 5% of people anyway. Seeing regular users most would just use the mouse...

g7r 6y ago
5% is a lot! But even if it wasn't, it is not a proper justification for breaking basic things.
krsdcbl 6y ago
No gain for 95% and a loss for 5% seems like an even worse outcome of changing default behaviour
- coldtea 6y ago
  Only if you don't take into account opportunity cost. You assume here that they've actively worked to change default behavior, but it is probably a zero-work-required by product of the widget they used (that gives them other capabilities thet do want) and to (a) revert to plain HTML textareas would remove this, (b) to add the default behavior to their widget would take extra effort.

tracyhenry 6y ago

I had to stop reading after the first three bullet points. Maybe the rest is reasonable, but first... When sharing to colleagues you get to choose if you allow them to edit/comment/view. That, to be honest, is the first thing I check when I share docs (be it Google Docs, Quip or Notion). I won't rely on the defaults of the software because it's too costly to not get it right. Second, you don't have to lock the document. As long as you disallow editing, you as the owner of the document still can edit the document. Am I missing something? Third, notifications shoot as soon as you enter colleague names. I get this might be annoying at first. But don't many great UX stuff need some kind of getting-used-to? When switching from Windows to OSX, I was shocked that you get to rename a folder when you hit ENTER, rather than open it. Guess what? I got used to it. I have my alternative to opening a folder and it's not slower. In this notification case I'd then just see entering the colleague names as the last step. Problem solved. All the first three bullet points are not inherent bad UX issues "built into the DNA" as claimed by OP. Notion is great. It's more powerful Google Docs and easy to use in general. The article is written in a way as if the author has not had any positive experiences from using Notion. That's unfortunate.

SCLeo 6y ago
OP does not want to disallow their colleagues from a editing a page altogether. They want to prevent accidental edits.
- tracyhenry 6y ago
  I think it's apparent that OP wants to disallow editing but allow commenting (see quotes down below). Notion provides exactly this feature when you share a doc but OP seems to have missed it and instead uses "lock a document" to do what he wants, which created all the problems in the first two sections. This feature is easy to find and is similar to what Google docs offers and so fairly learnable. > First thing you learn when getting used to Notion is that every page you share should be locked from editing! > The next problem with edit lock is that you can't unlock the page just for you. So you are a good user of Notion and keep all pages locked from editing. But every time you want to modify a page, you unlock it and everyone can (unintentionally) modify it while you're editing. > Adding or editing content isn't the only case when you need your page to be unlocked. It is impossible to add comments on locked page. ^^^ These quotes are all wrong. You don't lock your document. When you share a doc, configure the access rights (edit/comment/view only, similar to what you do when sharing a Google doc).

Solvitieg 6y ago

I see comments in this HN thread about word processors and agile development and I'm thinking... isn't Notion a tool to take notes?

busrf 6y ago
Some of the problem here is that people have many different use cases for Notion: personal note taking, project management, collaborative text editor, and company knowledge base. Notion markets itself as a general tool that can fulfill each of those use cases. As a result it is hard for them to come up with UX that fits everyone. Some of the things people are saying here that they can’t stand about Notion are some of the things that I like the most about it, and some of the improvements people are suggesting here are things that would make me abandon Notion if they changed it to be in line with what they suggest, and I think a lot of that is from difference in expected use case (I use it as a personal knowledge base) It is definitely a weakness of their product.

camgunz 6y ago

SWEs don't like Notion. Non-SWEs think it's above average. I legitimately use markdown in Vim and paste pages into Notion pages and, surprise surprise, I'm a lot more productive than people who don't do that. But Notion beats Google Docs--its chief competitor--for non-SWEs, so here we are. I feel like a good solution here is to let eng teams use a different tool.

shash7 6y ago

I've been building complex UIs since early this year and one thing that's been interesting is that whenever I add a feature which performs an action automatically for the user(let's call this a smart action), it almost always backfires. Generally speaking, people like their actions to be predictible, reproductive and deterministic. Whenever an app trys to add smart actions in the hopes of making the UI more responsive, it has the opposite reaction. Notion seems like one of those tools that relies on a lot of background smart actions. Not that I mind too much, I'm a big fan actually.

derekhsu 6y ago

I agree, but from my point of view, Notion's UI and UX are still way better than other platform such as Evernote. In addition, they are willing to accept suggestion such as modification of mobile app which is really positively changed after many complains.

theanirudh 6y ago

Dropbox Paper has the best editing experience. Notion should try to emulate that.

alphachloride 6y ago

This is the first time I paid attention to notion. Tangentially a UX issue - I find applications that save my data in the cloud by default less "weighty". Can't explain it rationally. It just feels that those documents are less permanent, secure, accessible, and "mine" than a file I can save to disk.

fomine3 6y ago

I'd like to say thank you for Notion team to support proper work with IME (at least for Japanese, Win/Linux/Android) from at least 1.5 years ago. SPA apps made by English speaker tend to have broken input field (Even twitter's tweet field) but Notion isn't even though it has complex features.

nojvek 6y ago

Notion has annoying UX, but compared to Atlassian Confluence or Dropbox Paper it’s better. Confluence is just awfully slow to load. Every little thing takes forever. Dropbox Paper feels like someone’s weekend project. It is so subpar and things seem to have bolted on without much thought. There’s still a lot to figure out when making a good intuitive knowledge base.

nojvek 6y ago

I did some perf profiling on Notion. Their JS just takes a long time to do basic things (even interpreting keystrokes) Seeing VSCode (which is a web tool) respond insanely fast for keystrokes and code completion makes me realize (amongst Microsoft products, Vscode is a gem - they’ve done a rare thing which is to make a complex performant web app that does editing really well)