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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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
It is indeed very slow. I don't understand why though.
I think it's how they cache/request the pages. The slowness is usually in switching pages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.