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UX Issues with Notion

telegra.ph

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Re: UX Issues with Notion

#31

Post by Kimitri »

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.

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!

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#32

Post by callumlocke »

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 though.)

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#33

Post by ysw0 »

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 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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#34

Post by ljm »

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#35

Post by bcherry »

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…

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#36

Post by jitl »

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…

I agree that in touch this makes more sense because edit and scroll use identical inputs (drag finger over document)

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#37

Post by switz »

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…

> 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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#38

Post by rfreiberger »

austinhutch wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#39

Post by joshuamorton »

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?

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#40

Post by thex10 »

Jonovono wrote: post #2

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

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).
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