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UX Issues with Notion

telegra.ph

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Re: UX Issues with Notion

#101

Post by busrf »

blunte wrote: post #15

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 sh…

> 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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#102

Post by rad_gruchalski »

callumlocke wrote: post #32
jitl wrote: post #22

(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 frus…

> 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 t…

> 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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#103

Post by hombre_fatal »

callumlocke wrote: post #32
jitl wrote: post #22

(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 frus…

> 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 t…

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#104

Post by slaymaker1907 »

skrebbel wrote: post #10

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 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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#105

Post by maccard »

porker wrote: post #90
polote wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notion is a not a good tool to create a knowledge base, the same way Google drive is a not a good tool to create a knowledge base. If you think a bit more, notion is more or less a Google drive with smileys. Which is not a critic.

What have you found is a good tool to create a knowledge base, at a small to medium sized company?

With all it's warts, confluence is pretty good. It's not good software, it runs like ass, has a crappy markdown editor. But it supports attachments, has a great jira integration, solid-ish markdown rendering, hierarchal pages, multiple projects, separated viewing and editing paradigms. But it's still confluence.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#106

Post by systemvoltage »

novok wrote: post #98
josephg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right; probably because most of the obj-c compiler toolchain was implemented when computers were slower. I was beating on xcode in my comment because it deserves it, but this problem isn't confined to xcode and swift. Compiling rust is also extremely slow. The new reddit feels like a slideshow (and despite launching years ago, how have the reddit team still not fixed the performance problems??) We're having this conv…

It's an economic tradeoff. Engineers are expensive and businesses choose what is most productive for them to what customers respond to. Also performance work is not fun and more work than new features. Performance bugs are harder to detect and quantify than normal crash bugs and such because they are statistical ranges, not binary on off states. Performance is taken into account when it matters for the product, you'l…

The economic stuff fails to account for slow death of their product as customers don’t even know how things have gotten slower over the years. Then all of a sudden a snappy competitor product appears and they jump the ship en masse.

The business people are still clueless and continue to double down on more features their customers don’t want. While the competitor is gaining market share.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#107

Post by camgunz »

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#108

Post by josephg »

novok wrote: post #98
josephg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right; probably because most of the obj-c compiler toolchain was implemented when computers were slower. I was beating on xcode in my comment because it deserves it, but this problem isn't confined to xcode and swift. Compiling rust is also extremely slow. The new reddit feels like a slideshow (and despite launching years ago, how have the reddit team still not fixed the performance problems??) We're having this conv…

It's an economic tradeoff. Engineers are expensive and businesses choose what is most productive for them to what customers respond to. Also performance work is not fun and more work than new features. Performance bugs are harder to detect and quantify than normal crash bugs and such because they are statistical ranges, not binary on off states. Performance is taken into account when it matters for the product, you'l…

> Performance is taken into account when it matters for the product, you'll notice this in games where they do a lot of perf improvement work.

I think most development shops chronically underestimate how much application performance matters for sales. Most people will never file bug reports when software is slow. They just "won't like that program for some reason". (Or worse, misattribute the reason they don't like your product.) Slowness is invisible to the developers because they're almost always using computers which are much faster than the computers their customers are using. And unless you actually take the time to record performance statistics, you won't have any idea this is the case.

Game developers know this. People measure the FPS they get on their gaming computers. But as far as I can tell, the reason isn't an essential quality of video games. The difference is culture. There's a culture in video game development of measuring performance. People have the tools and terminology to talk about it. In comparison, what are notion's performance numbers like? Does notion run at 60fps for the average user? How many ms of typing latency does it usually encounter? Does the team even know?

> Also swift & rust are slow due to their design as a language. They provide very strong guarantees and make a lot of thing static. It's very similar to the reasons why C++ is slow to compile.

Roll to disbelieve. Swift and rust are simpler languages than C++, and yet compile much more slowly. The reason C++ seems to compile slowly isn't templates. Its because of the way C++ header files need to be parsed over and over again, and thats not a problem rust and swift share. (Rob Pike has some great rants about this if anyone's interested.) A well written, from-scratch Swift compiler should be able to get compilation speeds closer to Go. At least, for debug builds.

I suspect if swift and rust were invented 20 years ago, we would still have been able to write compilers that ran at tolerable speeds on the computers of the day. And if thats the case, the reason for slow compilation speed is something other than language design.

> Also notion is like 10 engineers last time I checked, and they've decided to go towards speed of dev & features more than nicer, but slower to develop tools.

Notion can make that choice if they want. But until they fix performance, I won't / can't use their product.

> Also performance work is not fun

Speak for yourself - I love performance work. Its so measurable and the feeling of taking something sluggish and making it scream is delightful.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#109

Post by shash7 »

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#110

Post by benlc »

jitl wrote: post #28
turtles_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(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.

I appreciate the honesty with the situation on Android. Not usable is how I would describe it. Really looking forward to this getting addressed, keep it up
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