UX Issues with Notion

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.

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.

It really comes down to the oft-used expression, "do one thing, and do it well". People think they want a flying car, but once they try it they discover it's a bad car and a bad airplane.

Notion tries to do everything in one app - and for all users. To be fair, that last part is the fault of the user; if they can tell they are not the target audience, they should not use it. Unfortunately, it is such a "cool" app that the upper management audience falls for it and forces it upon the rest of the company.

So issue #1 is that it tries to replace too many other apps. But if you've used any of the apps it tries to replace, you will know what I mean.

If you write much, you will find Google Docs or even MS Word to be better.

If you use spreadsheets for more than just columns and rows to put basic text in, then you'll find Google Sheets or Excel to be better.

I haven't even bothered trying to use Notion as a database. I would bet real money that it would be a regretful experience.

If you use kanban boards, you'll most likely be happier with Trello or Jira or Asana or other organizer apps.

Issue #2 is about target audience and use cases.

If the target audience is developers, especially those who type quickly, they will suffer greatly. I don't want to sound condescending about other audiences, but from years of seeing "regular users" use software, I would say that slower actions and more (tedious) mouse clicking is already their way of working - so Notion is fine for them.

I'm not a UX researcher, but I believe part of their work involves measuring how users use software - which features are most used and which ones are least used; which UX behaviors are surprises that get in the way of the user; which features do users spend time looking for but never find; and so on.

Here are two specific examples - a small not awful but still obvious UX misfeature, and perhaps the worst usability behavior I face all the time:

The Change Icon feature when you click the icon of an item in the nav panel should not be initiated by clicking the icon of the item. The purpose of a nav tree is to navigate. It is not a place to edit items, at least not as first-class actions. Also, icons exist to help the user more quickly identify the thing they are looking for. The user is compelled to click on the icon as a means of choosing the nav item they want to open/expand down. But in Notion, clicking that icon pops up a Change Icon window. Other extra actions, like rename, delete, share, etc. are properly buried under an on-hover [...] popup menu, and change icon should be there as well. Incidentally, the icon in the nav item is between the expand > button and the Item Name. So even when trying to expand the tree, it is fairly easy to misclick and open the Change Item popup.

I reported that misfeature many times to them, even directly to one of their onboarding specialists for our company. As a developer, I am certain that moving that action to the [...] menu and making the icon have the same click effect as the Nav Item Text would be a small effort. That it hasn't been fixed yet tells me something bad about their management... because, in this case I know I'm not (just) a weird user. The frequency with which users will want or need to change nav item (usually a short name for the page) will be very low.

But my worst pain comes from the slash / character handling. When writing in a block, hitting the / causes a general action helper popup to open. If you type "In Elixir, we prefer cond or function pattern matching to if/else", you'll get a popup because of the /, and the popup will search for "else" within some list of actions. If you happen to be typing quickly, and if that if/else happened to be at the end of the block you were typing (such that you now hit return), then you'll get whatever action applied to the block or document state that was associated with that action.

In the if/else case, it happens to match on "Create Linked Database", and your return puts you on a new block which conveniently opens another popup to help you select a database from within the user databases in your Notion tree.

Oh also, the /else got eaten and is now gone; you may not notice, because you're now in a new block trying to decide how to undo this select database thing...

There are so many wild possibilities here. You can inadvertently apply H1 style to the block. You can insert an inline equation (with a convenient popup to type your eq into!). You can delete your whole block. To find out what all you could do, just type / and scroll down the list.

By the way, if you're in an inline code section `x = a / b you get that popup, and you can't ignore it by typing the closing `.

Here's the puzzle. Keyboard shortcuts are for power users. Keyboard shortcuts also usually require a modifier, unless you have a multi-mode editor like Vim. If a power user wants to use a keyboard shortcut, they will use it once they learn it. Most people, even casual users, know about CTRL-C/V, or at least CTRL-Z. Really simple users can still use the mouse to do things. It's just poor judgement to make a standard typed keypress to launch an action helper.

Furthermore, it begs the question of "What does Notion expect people to be putting into blocks?" I would have thought people would put mostly content, and then occasionally sprinkle some formatting or other goodies. Again, mouse-menu actions or modifier keyboard shortcuts could meet this need.

Lastly, I didn't really go into detail about why Notion is inferior to specialized apps, but I have zero doubt that I could take any typical Excel user and show them the Notion "spreadsheet" block and they would be frustrated to the point that they would give up. Take any writer and give them a Notion editor that interrupts their typing all the time, and they will give up too.

At my company, at least in my group, we occasionally write first and only in Notion. Notion is our official document store, but often we write first elsewhere and then copy paste (a whole other fail topic) into Notion, or most often we just put a link in the Notion page that leads the user to the real document in Gdocs.