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.
>Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?
Likewise, wouldn't you be baffled if you opened up a wikipedia article and found you were automatically editing it, and now you need to worry about making an accident every time you visit the site because you had no intentions of editing content, instead just consuming it.
But that's just because people are using the product in different modalities.
Are you using Notion as more of a live editor, where the documents are often short lived and transactional in nature? Or are you using it as a sort of permanent knowledge base and history?
The reality of the situation is that each modality commands different designs, and Notion generally tries to solve for all of them with single-minded design principles.
I think there's a strange fallacy in our industry of UX design which dictates that your product should resolve to simple design decisions or become convoluted configurable behemoths driven by the unending deluge of ad hoc decisions from customer asks - like there's no middle ground. Some designer is hopping up and down in a fit going, "but the user doesn't understand MY design principles!"
I feel like "tech" has ultimately failed in this regard.
> 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.
You understand what the OP is complaining about is not the same as the scenario you presented, right?
I'm not even sure why you brought it up; is it to imply that _any_ 'friction' is bad? Is having to enter 'insert mode' in vi bad? No, of course not. For those that want it, that 'friction' provides value.
> 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.)
It definitely depends on the purpose of the document. But I do find that people who are not experienced with notion will accidentally edit anything and everything that isn't locked if you share it with them.
In an organization where one team is using notion and is using it to share docs to others that haven't gotten used to it yet, or where you constantly have new team members encountering it for the first time, locking widely shared pages is pretty important and easy to forget.
> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?
To be fair, when sharing google documents widely, one common practice is to make the shared version comment(/propose suggestion) only, and often to share the /preview link by default, so that you have to explicitly navigate to the editable version of the page.
This helps with performance and with accidental edits, and many popular documents still get weird suggestions that are clearly unintended.
> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?
I find the Google Docs feature to share a document and allow suggestions only to be very useful. It lets me, as the author, keep track of what’s going on.
> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?
Word (and friends) kinda has that. I'm not sure what the heuristic is, but in some circumstances it will put a message in the window title saying you need to save a copy of the current file before you can begin editing. I know it happens for downloaded documents, and that's about it.
> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?
I'd like to agree here, but I also find myself liking the fact that Docs has the "Viewing", "Suggesting" and "Editing" personas available for use. These options are intended to mirror Word's review features, but it also fits the idea of a "Start Editing" button, in my opinion.
There's times where I really like editing right away, but also being sure that I won't do any accidental edits. So yeah, I definitely agree that accidental edits are at the root of the problem for this.
What you call "seamless-editable-by-default" is my biggest frustration with notion; I wouldn't characterize it as "seamless-editable" though, I'd characterize it as "accidental edits". Like the OP, my org has taken to locks/unlocks all the time. (And this is extra frustrating, because the load on "unlock" is often worse than the actual page load!)
Several months ago, I got so fed up with edit-by-default that I started a chat in the feedback thing in the lower-right. What I learned from that chat is that other people weren't using Notion the same way we are. We use it largely as a wiki & knowledge base; it hadn't occurred to me that other people aren't using it as a knowledge base, which is almost by definition read-heavy.
But I also want to point out that editable-by-default is exacerbated because other aspects of the UI have trained me to have behaviors that result in accidental edits.
----
Me:
> I'm sick of making accidental edits.
> 9 times out of 10, when I go to page it's to read it not to edit it. Editing is rare enough that when I want to do it I'm 100% down with having to click an "edit" button or something to explicitly switch to an editing mode.
> This isn't a permissions thing. I should be allowed to edit all of these pages. It's a UI thing that it's too easy to accidentally edit.
> This is an account-scoped problem. It shouldn't be broader; other people in the org shouldn't be affected by my preferences. It shouldn't be narrower; I don't want to have to configure this for each page.
> Many parts of the UI seem to be designed to cause accidental edits. Positioning the cursor at just the right spot can introduce an empty line. It's easy to accidentally drag something when highlighting text to copy. Clicking a link to another Notion page opens in the same tab normally, so I get in the habit of middle-clicking them to open in a new tab. But if it's an external link, then for some moronic reason middle-click doesn't open it (just use damn `<a>` elements! stop breaking the web!), and then I get middle-click paste (because X11) and I end up accidentally pasting some garbage in to the page-- _because of a behavior that other parts of the UI trained me to do_.
> I'm sorry for the rant, but it seems like such a basic thing, and it's been so frustrating.
> Like, my ideal resolution is you point out a setting on a page that I missed and I say "nevermind, cheers".
Gerard:
> (a lengthy reply explaining how to use page locks and database locks)
Me:
> Re: Page lock: That's not a solution, for a bunch of reasons that I'd tried to express in the original message:
> - I don't want to manage this for individual pages, that is error-prone and tedious; if there's a page that doesn't have it set, I won't notice that it's not set and risk making accidental edits. I don't want to have to remember to turn it back on after making an edit.
> - I don't want prevent others from editing it, just myself
> - I don't want others turning off the page lock to affect me. I don't want to have to train everyone to always set it after editing a page.
> Re: Database lock: I'm not sure about other parts of the org, but I don't really use database pages, so that's not of interest to me.
Winnie:
> Hello Luke,
> Winnie here, jumping in for Gerard. Thanks for sharing your thoughtful feedback!
> We don't currently have page setting that lets you be on a viewing mode and have some sort of prompt if you want to edit a page. It’s a legit use case, though, and definitely something we want to support in the future.
> This would totally help those that are creating wikis or knowledgebase, so I've passed this to our product team to take to heart for further improvements.
I enjoyed the time I had with notion, but ultimately it didn't feel "worth it" to keep around. The free tier is too restrictive, and while I preferred the premium experience, the price was ultimately much too high to stomach.
I’m sure it’s been discussed internally but would a rich API for third-party developers to build alternative clients, integrations or plugins ease some of these issues? I can see situations where a simple plugin could help companies to paper over parts of Notion that don’t perfectly fit their workflows. If a company prefers a read heavy workflow they can modify some behaviour.
> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?
Not at all. In fact I prefer the "viewing" mode in Google docs when I'm just reading a document written by someone else. Why would you want everything to be editable all the time? Usually docs are produced by one or maybe a few people and viewed by many more.
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.
> 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.
I think there's a great product somewhere in Notion – the blending of wiki/database/etc is great – but THIS is the biggest issue I have with it. Everything I do just takes that bit longer than software that I choose to use, because everything is designed around the mouse.
Keyboard shortcuts aren't enough to create a good UX for the keyboard, the whole UX needs consideration, and Notion has unfortunately failed on that.
For a while their text editor was very poor, to the point where my colleagues and I all edited text in other software and copied it in. This has improved a lot in the last year or so, but there are still plenty of issues at the block level and upwards, it's just the word-level that got better.
Please, If you could you should, it helps us, the ones building new tools, to avoid making the same mistakes.
I find your comment, and the post like this, very useful, often I look for inspiration in most popular tools, Notion recently, because I want to build something that feels familiar for many many users, yet new, and I'd like incorporate only the good patterns and trying to not make same mistakes.
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
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
> 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.
You can just keep typing and the menu will close. The vast majority of the time, it doesn't actually interrupt the flow of typing in content. This happens even if what you are typing matches with a menu item. As you said, you have to press enter to actually invoke one of the actions in the menu.
Using a single key to invoke a menu and then having successive keystrokes search through that menu as well as enter the text in the editor at the same time is a UI choice I actually vastly prefer over having say dedicated keyboard shortcuts for each of those menu items, or having to click a button to open the menu. It's similar to having leader-key-driven menu selection in Vim or Spacemacs (but of course different in that the editor is modal). It is a menu discoverability and ease-of-use tradeoff they have to make.
Everyone has their own experience, but I drive Notion entirely by keyboard - and I have a touchbar mac (with caps lock rebound to esc). Their search is also really good, so I never really find myself clicking around.
For all the small UX bits that aren’t 100%, there are a dozen other apps that can’t even get pictures, text, equations, and hierarchy right. Google Drive, org mode, or Roam are complete paradigm shifts away from an extremely consistent text editor that can embed anything. For every little quirk with icons, I’m reminded that while Notion might not be perfect, it’s still leagues beyond anything else in the space. And it shouldn’t even be hard.
The slash menu drive me mad. Why the heck would anyone want it in the middle of a word? The only time I use slash commands is in a brand new empty block. It would be lovely to simply be able to disable this.
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.
Yep, I stopped using it because it became painfully slow, and I only had about 50 items on a page. I’m using 2018 15” MacBook Pro core i7. It’s a petty because the reason I started to use it was it’s speed and light weight, now it turned into another monolith, just like the ones it tried to beat in the beginning
I worked at an org that used Confluence heavily and remember how long load times could get if the page was large.
I was therefore pretty surprised to hear that Notion is apparently worse. I suspect a lot of the sluggishness with both programs is at least partially because they don't render much server side. Compare how slowly a .ipynb file loads on GitHub compared to Markdown.
Yep, it feels really sluggish. We benchmarked several tools to work as a documentation platform for our company. Notion was one of the candidates but it felt extremely slow and somehow really awkward to use. In the end we decided to use Slite and it has really served us well. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for this kind of tool!
I think it's calls + the app itself (Electron?) is slow. After a certain page size is reached, editing becomes unbearably slow which necessitates starting a new page.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
At quick glance it looks like nvultra is very similar to Bear (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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
jitl|5 years ago
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.
gravity13|5 years ago
Likewise, wouldn't you be baffled if you opened up a wikipedia article and found you were automatically editing it, and now you need to worry about making an accident every time you visit the site because you had no intentions of editing content, instead just consuming it.
But that's just because people are using the product in different modalities.
Are you using Notion as more of a live editor, where the documents are often short lived and transactional in nature? Or are you using it as a sort of permanent knowledge base and history?
The reality of the situation is that each modality commands different designs, and Notion generally tries to solve for all of them with single-minded design principles.
I think there's a strange fallacy in our industry of UX design which dictates that your product should resolve to simple design decisions or become convoluted configurable behemoths driven by the unending deluge of ad hoc decisions from customer asks - like there's no middle ground. Some designer is hopping up and down in a fit going, "but the user doesn't understand MY design principles!"
I feel like "tech" has ultimately failed in this regard.
switz|5 years ago
You understand what the OP is complaining about is not the same as the scenario you presented, right?
I'm not even sure why you brought it up; is it to imply that _any_ 'friction' is bad? Is having to enter 'insert mode' in vi bad? No, of course not. For those that want it, that 'friction' provides value.
callumlocke|5 years ago
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.)
bcherry|5 years ago
In an organization where one team is using notion and is using it to share docs to others that haven't gotten used to it yet, or where you constantly have new team members encountering it for the first time, locking widely shared pages is pretty important and easy to forget.
joshuamorton|5 years ago
To be fair, when sharing google documents widely, one common practice is to make the shared version comment(/propose suggestion) only, and often to share the /preview link by default, so that you have to explicitly navigate to the editable version of the page.
This helps with performance and with accidental edits, and many popular documents still get weird suggestions that are clearly unintended.
enjoiful|5 years ago
Viewing a document on mobile is painful, since trying to scroll through the document often results in the app thinking I'm trying to edit the page.
I do think docs should default to read only mode on mobile to prevent this from happening.
amluto|5 years ago
I find the Google Docs feature to share a document and allow suggestions only to be very useful. It lets me, as the author, keep track of what’s going on.
coldtea|5 years ago
Not if they were shared collaborative documents...
In those I would be baffled by the opposite...
cuddlybacon|5 years ago
Word (and friends) kinda has that. I'm not sure what the heuristic is, but in some circumstances it will put a message in the window title saying you need to save a copy of the current file before you can begin editing. I know it happens for downloaded documents, and that's about it.
jerieljan|5 years ago
I'd like to agree here, but I also find myself liking the fact that Docs has the "Viewing", "Suggesting" and "Editing" personas available for use. These options are intended to mirror Word's review features, but it also fits the idea of a "Start Editing" button, in my opinion.
There's times where I really like editing right away, but also being sure that I won't do any accidental edits. So yeah, I definitely agree that accidental edits are at the root of the problem for this.
boringg|5 years ago
LukeShu|5 years ago
Several months ago, I got so fed up with edit-by-default that I started a chat in the feedback thing in the lower-right. What I learned from that chat is that other people weren't using Notion the same way we are. We use it largely as a wiki & knowledge base; it hadn't occurred to me that other people aren't using it as a knowledge base, which is almost by definition read-heavy.
But I also want to point out that editable-by-default is exacerbated because other aspects of the UI have trained me to have behaviors that result in accidental edits.
----
Me:
> I'm sick of making accidental edits.
> 9 times out of 10, when I go to page it's to read it not to edit it. Editing is rare enough that when I want to do it I'm 100% down with having to click an "edit" button or something to explicitly switch to an editing mode.
> This isn't a permissions thing. I should be allowed to edit all of these pages. It's a UI thing that it's too easy to accidentally edit.
> This is an account-scoped problem. It shouldn't be broader; other people in the org shouldn't be affected by my preferences. It shouldn't be narrower; I don't want to have to configure this for each page.
> Many parts of the UI seem to be designed to cause accidental edits. Positioning the cursor at just the right spot can introduce an empty line. It's easy to accidentally drag something when highlighting text to copy. Clicking a link to another Notion page opens in the same tab normally, so I get in the habit of middle-clicking them to open in a new tab. But if it's an external link, then for some moronic reason middle-click doesn't open it (just use damn `<a>` elements! stop breaking the web!), and then I get middle-click paste (because X11) and I end up accidentally pasting some garbage in to the page-- _because of a behavior that other parts of the UI trained me to do_.
> I'm sorry for the rant, but it seems like such a basic thing, and it's been so frustrating.
> Like, my ideal resolution is you point out a setting on a page that I missed and I say "nevermind, cheers".
Gerard:
> (a lengthy reply explaining how to use page locks and database locks)
Me:
> Re: Page lock: That's not a solution, for a bunch of reasons that I'd tried to express in the original message:
> - I don't want to manage this for individual pages, that is error-prone and tedious; if there's a page that doesn't have it set, I won't notice that it's not set and risk making accidental edits. I don't want to have to remember to turn it back on after making an edit.
> - I don't want prevent others from editing it, just myself
> - I don't want others turning off the page lock to affect me. I don't want to have to train everyone to always set it after editing a page.
> Re: Database lock: I'm not sure about other parts of the org, but I don't really use database pages, so that's not of interest to me.
Winnie:
> Hello Luke,
> Winnie here, jumping in for Gerard. Thanks for sharing your thoughtful feedback!
> We don't currently have page setting that lets you be on a viewing mode and have some sort of prompt if you want to edit a page. It’s a legit use case, though, and definitely something we want to support in the future.
> This would totally help those that are creating wikis or knowledgebase, so I've passed this to our product team to take to heart for further improvements.
rickyc091|5 years ago
smoldesu|5 years ago
krsdcbl|5 years ago
That's absolutely the default behaviour for Word when opening a Doc sent from somebody else ("enable editing"), and it does make sense like this.
myguysi|5 years ago
The first rule of UX design: it’s not about you.
Perhaps OP isn’t Notion’s target audience, but dismissing something because you don’t share their perspective is not great.
jamil7|5 years ago
perryizgr8|5 years ago
Not at all. In fact I prefer the "viewing" mode in Google docs when I'm just reading a document written by someone else. Why would you want everything to be editable all the time? Usually docs are produced by one or maybe a few people and viewed by many more.
wikibob|5 years ago
Can you run a report on how often folks lock-unlock-relook pages?
This should be a good proxy for how many people are hacking in a workflow to allow for explicitly entering edit mode.
kyawzazaw|5 years ago
blunte|5 years ago
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
danpalmer|5 years ago
I think there's a great product somewhere in Notion – the blending of wiki/database/etc is great – but THIS is the biggest issue I have with it. Everything I do just takes that bit longer than software that I choose to use, because everything is designed around the mouse.
Keyboard shortcuts aren't enough to create a good UX for the keyboard, the whole UX needs consideration, and Notion has unfortunately failed on that.
For a while their text editor was very poor, to the point where my colleagues and I all edited text in other software and copied it in. This has improved a lot in the last year or so, but there are still plenty of issues at the block level and upwards, it's just the word-level that got better.
alfonsodev|5 years ago
Please, If you could you should, it helps us, the ones building new tools, to avoid making the same mistakes.
I find your comment, and the post like this, very useful, often I look for inspiration in most popular tools, Notion recently, because I want to build something that feels familiar for many many users, yet new, and I'd like incorporate only the good patterns and trying to not make same mistakes.
corobo|5 years ago
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/
(2) 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
busrf|5 years ago
You can just keep typing and the menu will close. The vast majority of the time, it doesn't actually interrupt the flow of typing in content. This happens even if what you are typing matches with a menu item. As you said, you have to press enter to actually invoke one of the actions in the menu.
Using a single key to invoke a menu and then having successive keystrokes search through that menu as well as enter the text in the editor at the same time is a UI choice I actually vastly prefer over having say dedicated keyboard shortcuts for each of those menu items, or having to click a button to open the menu. It's similar to having leader-key-driven menu selection in Vim or Spacemacs (but of course different in that the editor is modal). It is a menu discoverability and ease-of-use tradeoff they have to make.
jkelleyrtp|5 years ago
For all the small UX bits that aren’t 100%, there are a dozen other apps that can’t even get pictures, text, equations, and hierarchy right. Google Drive, org mode, or Roam are complete paradigm shifts away from an extremely consistent text editor that can embed anything. For every little quirk with icons, I’m reminded that while Notion might not be perfect, it’s still leagues beyond anything else in the space. And it shouldn’t even be hard.
acjohnson55|5 years ago
skrebbel|5 years ago
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.
turtles_|5 years ago
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.
gazelleeatslion|5 years ago
For a mere thousands of dollars you can join the fun.
I imagine by M2 though this golden year will be far gone as everyone increases even more how much resources their apps eat.
usaphp|5 years ago
SwiftyBug|5 years ago
slaymaker1907|5 years ago
I was therefore pretty surprised to hear that Notion is apparently worse. I suspect a lot of the sluggishness with both programs is at least partially because they don't render much server side. Compare how slowly a .ipynb file loads on GitHub compared to Markdown.
Kimitri|5 years ago
preommr|5 years ago
I've tested notion on some old laptops and it did ok. But I only tested it on some empty documents, so maybe that's why it wasn't too slow.
ysw0|5 years ago
as-j|5 years ago
> 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|5 years ago
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.
chrisfrantz|5 years ago
Most of the comments seem to be rather small compared to the overall use and productivity gains that something like Notion offers.
OkGoDoIt|5 years ago
danpalmer|5 years ago
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.
npunt|5 years ago
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|5 years ago
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.
Jonovono|5 years ago
sswaner|5 years ago
I have been using Bear daily for over 3 years and the features and Markdown support are great.
Not affiliated, just a fan/customer.
jameshe|5 years ago
[0] https://github.com/konstantinmuenster/notion-clone
deckard1|5 years ago
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?
thex10|5 years ago
rvieira|5 years ago
threatofrain|5 years ago
jonwest|5 years ago
reffaelwallen|5 years ago
reffaelwallen|5 years ago
corytheboyd|5 years ago
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|5 years ago
natrik|5 years ago
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.
alvarlagerlof|5 years ago
- 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.
Swizec|5 years ago
scrapcode|5 years ago
shash7|5 years ago
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.
savrajsingh|5 years ago
spdegabrielle|5 years ago
wim|5 years ago
keithnz|5 years ago
Tomte|5 years ago
But it's a traditional wiki.
rkangel|5 years ago
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.
camgunz|5 years ago
I feel like a good solution here is to let eng teams use a different tool.
pictur|5 years ago
derekhsu|5 years ago
austinhutch|5 years ago
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|5 years ago
jitl|5 years ago
theanirudh|5 years ago
ljm|5 years ago
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.
nojvek|5 years ago
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)
tracyhenry|5 years ago
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|5 years ago
nojvek|5 years ago
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.
alphachloride|5 years ago
fomine3|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.
fnl|5 years ago
polote|5 years ago
danpalmer|5 years ago
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.
Solvitieg|5 years ago
busrf|5 years ago
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.
coldtea|5 years ago
So? That's probably used by less than 5% of people anyway. Seeing regular users most would just use the mouse...
krsdcbl|5 years ago
g7r|5 years ago
CoachRufus87|5 years ago
gravity13|5 years ago
(clearly Notion is too cool for people like us to use...)