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This is a great list of reasons to use Notion as your company's information hub. It's basically a wiki, but with some great templating and database and access c

This is a great list of reasons to use Notion as your company's information hub. It's basically a wiki, but with some great templating and database and access control and usability features that make it especially wonderful for teams. Google used a wiki internally for all company information for a decade or so until it was finally replaced with who-knows-what. The one thing holding me back from declaring that all new companies should use Notion for everything is the text editing. Doing any kind of long-form content, such as blog posts or design docs or technical documentation, is arduous and painful. The editor is usable but clunky. Editing links, selecting text, and using formatting shortcuts is wonky. Joining paragraphs is hard. If they can make editing more fluid, it might just be the perfect information organization tool.

npunt 5y ago
Agree, I really like Notion but even after a bunch of great updates the text editing and a few other parts still feel off, e.g. the UI is really jumpy and makes the whole thing feel physically unstable, there's huge margins at smaller window sizes, etc. It's getting there, and worlds better than a few years ago, but it still isn't an extension of myself the way other tools are.
- jitl 5y ago
  Can you tell me more about the “jumpy UI”? Are you referring to text styling toolbar, or something else?
  - kirso 5y ago
    If you open a page as an overlay of the main page and start typing your blog post - a simple mistype or misclick will close it which is really annoying. Any easy fix arguably to always open it as a standalone window, however the UX still shouldn't be this way.
  - npunt 5y ago
    Hey Jake, great job on the text selection fix! As far as the jumpiness, its the gestalt of the experience, from a ton of papercuts big and small: 1. I often have the sidebar closed, and whenever the mouse passes over anywhere on the left side of the window it pops open, or will jump open and closed if you're in a particular area. It'll also remain open while the window isn't focus, such as when you pass by it on the way to the window next to Notion. When resizing the window from the left it always pops up and stays up. Rather than just use the app it's constantly making me conscious of it, even if to just avoid accidentally popping it open. 2. The canvas doesn't immediately repaint on resize, it waits until the mouse stops moving. This lack of instant feedback feels like it's perpetually catching up to what I'm doing [1]. I use Notion alongside other apps, so I'm resizing to get the maximum information on the screen with the minimum of UI space taken, but to do this means I have to move, wait and see how it repaints, move again, etc etc. This is exacerbated by the massive left/right %-width window margins, which make it hard to reason about what content will look like until the resize is complete. 3. Hover states everywhere, everything lights up when my mouse goes over stuff. With all corners and most of the canvas containing hover states there's no 'safe' place to move or put my mouse without chrome getting in my face. In small doses this is fine, and hover states are generally helpful to reveal present location, but at some point it's all too much. 4. Related, block grab handles and +'s are distracting and when I'm not paying close attention and clicking somewhere down the page where text is, there's a chance I hit one of those and a menu appears. I never want the menus, nor do I want to carefully move my mouse to avoid hitting these in the margins, I just want to write. 5. When using '/', the menu pops up, same thing. Wish that only did that at the beginning of a block. I don't even know the mental model for what is supposed to happen when I invoke and use it mid-paragraph. Does it affect this para or the next? And if its this para, why would I suddenly convert this para into something else midway through typing? 6. Tooltips. On left menu actions like search, updates, etc. On block grab handles. On formatting menus. Everywhere tooltips, for even the most self-evident of features (bolds[2] italics underlines links etc). These also persist when you no longer focus on the app (move the mouse away or cmd-tab). These are probably only useful for new users, not every time we use every small feature in the app in perpetuity. 7. In dark mode, resizing the window quickly will reveal the edges to have a coat of white underneath (the app's default background-color). Makes for a very non-native, 'barely held together' feeling to the app. Resize sublime, obsidian, vscode, etc and things just reflow and the window is the same color and nothing hits conscious awareness. 8. Making page icons changeable from the sidebar lessens the feeling of solidness, because it's a punishment if you click to go to a page and happen to hit the icon. I feel the same way about rendering the arrows for pages that do not have subpages - they have negative utility because I think there's something there that isn't. 9. If I select text, a formatter menu appears. If I then right click text, a different search/cut/copy/paste menu appears in addition to the formatting menu. Two separate menus in separate places open at the same time.[3] 10. If you click anywhere in a table, it automatically opens pickers / menus. For some % of the time this is a punishment because these menus cover up content, and it gets back to the idea that you can't rest a cursor anywhere without some sort of thing pop up. Airtable on the other hand feels a lot better because when I click on a select field, it doesn't automatically open the picker, it simply makes that box selected, and if I want to edit I click the dropdown or press enter. I guess the best way to summarize it is using Notion feels like I'm always avoiding the punishment of UI jumping in my face for clicking somewhere wrong (see fitts' law), typing the wrong character, or even moving the mouse in the wrong place. --- [1]: feels a little like this https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ctl73/high_ping_in_real_life/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ctl73/high_ping_in_... [2]: the bold 'B' icon isn't bold btw [3]: There are five distinct context menus in Notion: formatter, Search Google / c/c/p (word selected), Search Google (no selection; why this exists is beyond me), link, and block right click. Just right click around and you can get more than one to open simultaneously.
jitl 5y ago
Can you share more about what makes “selecting text” and “using formatting shortcuts” wonky? We shipped normal text selection a few weeks ago, so it’d be great to know if we made things better/worse/uglier/slower for you recently. The link editor… we got that one so wrong. You basically have to arrow key into a link to edit it?? We way over-optimized for minimalism and visiting links at the expense of good, understandable UX.

npunt 5y ago

Agree, I really like Notion but even after a bunch of great updates the text editing and a few other parts still feel off, e.g. the UI is really jumpy and makes the whole thing feel physically unstable, there's huge margins at smaller window sizes, etc. It's getting there, and worlds better than a few years ago, but it still isn't an extension of myself the way other tools are.

jitl 5y ago
Can you tell me more about the “jumpy UI”? Are you referring to text styling toolbar, or something else?
- kirso 5y ago
  If you open a page as an overlay of the main page and start typing your blog post - a simple mistype or misclick will close it which is really annoying. Any easy fix arguably to always open it as a standalone window, however the UX still shouldn't be this way.
- npunt 5y ago
  Hey Jake, great job on the text selection fix! As far as the jumpiness, its the gestalt of the experience, from a ton of papercuts big and small: 1. I often have the sidebar closed, and whenever the mouse passes over anywhere on the left side of the window it pops open, or will jump open and closed if you're in a particular area. It'll also remain open while the window isn't focus, such as when you pass by it on the way to the window next to Notion. When resizing the window from the left it always pops up and stays up. Rather than just use the app it's constantly making me conscious of it, even if to just avoid accidentally popping it open. 2. The canvas doesn't immediately repaint on resize, it waits until the mouse stops moving. This lack of instant feedback feels like it's perpetually catching up to what I'm doing [1]. I use Notion alongside other apps, so I'm resizing to get the maximum information on the screen with the minimum of UI space taken, but to do this means I have to move, wait and see how it repaints, move again, etc etc. This is exacerbated by the massive left/right %-width window margins, which make it hard to reason about what content will look like until the resize is complete. 3. Hover states everywhere, everything lights up when my mouse goes over stuff. With all corners and most of the canvas containing hover states there's no 'safe' place to move or put my mouse without chrome getting in my face. In small doses this is fine, and hover states are generally helpful to reveal present location, but at some point it's all too much. 4. Related, block grab handles and +'s are distracting and when I'm not paying close attention and clicking somewhere down the page where text is, there's a chance I hit one of those and a menu appears. I never want the menus, nor do I want to carefully move my mouse to avoid hitting these in the margins, I just want to write. 5. When using '/', the menu pops up, same thing. Wish that only did that at the beginning of a block. I don't even know the mental model for what is supposed to happen when I invoke and use it mid-paragraph. Does it affect this para or the next? And if its this para, why would I suddenly convert this para into something else midway through typing? 6. Tooltips. On left menu actions like search, updates, etc. On block grab handles. On formatting menus. Everywhere tooltips, for even the most self-evident of features (bolds[2] italics underlines links etc). These also persist when you no longer focus on the app (move the mouse away or cmd-tab). These are probably only useful for new users, not every time we use every small feature in the app in perpetuity. 7. In dark mode, resizing the window quickly will reveal the edges to have a coat of white underneath (the app's default background-color). Makes for a very non-native, 'barely held together' feeling to the app. Resize sublime, obsidian, vscode, etc and things just reflow and the window is the same color and nothing hits conscious awareness. 8. Making page icons changeable from the sidebar lessens the feeling of solidness, because it's a punishment if you click to go to a page and happen to hit the icon. I feel the same way about rendering the arrows for pages that do not have subpages - they have negative utility because I think there's something there that isn't. 9. If I select text, a formatter menu appears. If I then right click text, a different search/cut/copy/paste menu appears in addition to the formatting menu. Two separate menus in separate places open at the same time.[3] 10. If you click anywhere in a table, it automatically opens pickers / menus. For some % of the time this is a punishment because these menus cover up content, and it gets back to the idea that you can't rest a cursor anywhere without some sort of thing pop up. Airtable on the other hand feels a lot better because when I click on a select field, it doesn't automatically open the picker, it simply makes that box selected, and if I want to edit I click the dropdown or press enter. I guess the best way to summarize it is using Notion feels like I'm always avoiding the punishment of UI jumping in my face for clicking somewhere wrong (see fitts' law), typing the wrong character, or even moving the mouse in the wrong place. --- [1]: feels a little like this https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ctl73/high_ping_in_real_life/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ctl73/high_ping_in_... [2]: the bold 'B' icon isn't bold btw [3]: There are five distinct context menus in Notion: formatter, Search Google / c/c/p (word selected), Search Google (no selection; why this exists is beyond me), link, and block right click. Just right click around and you can get more than one to open simultaneously.

jitl 5y ago

Can you share more about what makes “selecting text” and “using formatting shortcuts” wonky? We shipped normal text selection a few weeks ago, so it’d be great to know if we made things better/worse/uglier/slower for you recently. The link editor… we got that one so wrong. You basically have to arrow key into a link to edit it?? We way over-optimized for minimalism and visiting links at the expense of good, understandable UX.