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UX Issues with Notion

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Re: UX Issues with Notion

#91

Post by krono »

deckard1 wrote: post #66
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO notion is not a short-form note taking app, and I think it's not ever going to the right app for that use case (though I know lots use it that way anyway). I personally use Keep for most "notes" and notion for "documents". Some of the documents are notes but they're long-form research / project documents.

again, you can do both of these in vim/Joplin/Obsidian/Google Docs or probably a hundred other tools.

Sometimes you just don't really know what you need until you're knee-deep in it, and that is exactly where Notion shines.

Whenever you find the data that you're entering is more relational than you originally imagined it'd be, just change it into a Table. Easy.

Got more random thoughts to add to a table item? No problemo, just open the item and you have a full-blown page to work with (which you can even nest another table inside of).

Some random item that you should really follow-up on next Tuesday? Just add a reminder.

Somehow that just resonates with the way my non-typical (adhd) brain works, and it's what's keeping me with Notion for my personal stuff despite its frustrating slowness and many other flaws.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#92

Post by npunt »

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#93

Post by coldtea »

>This one is a real shame. I still can't believe it. If you select any text block, you can't navigate using Page Up and Page Down keys.

So? That's probably used by less than 5% of people anyway. Seeing regular users most would just use the mouse...

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#94

Post by coldtea »

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?*

Not if they were shared collaborative documents...

In those I would be baffled by the opposite...

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#95

Post by npunt »

corobo wrote: post #21
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…

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 Obsidia…

If you'll allow me to rant a bit about Obsidian, its never going to be a mainstream competitor to Notion because it's file-based. For modern tools like Notion, Airtable, etc the filesystem is just a fallback option for piping data around when other more direct methods do not exist. Modern tools are database-driven, supporting multiple data types (images, text, tables, etc), different editing UIs for different content, multi-user support with comments, and instantaneous pointer updates when content is renamed/deleted/moved.

I've seen several products now including Obsidian that seem to take markdown support quite literally, centering themselves around .md files and markdown presentation (### Heading 3), rather than simply markdown keyboard shortcuts and ability to export as markdown. Markdown has its place but its primarily for easy diffing in text-only content like code editors, or a human readable option for backing up content. Tools like Obsidian are essentially lightly tweaked code editors, not modern project-based editors the whole company can use.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#96

Post by josephg »

novok wrote: post #78
josephg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. I have a 4 year old laptop that cost me $3000. Xcode is so laggy sometimes that if I type, it'll miss keystrokes and words come out garbled beyond recognition. A few weeks ago some source code I downloaded from github wouldn't compile because the swift compiler spent too long doing type inference, and decided to error out. I'm haunted by a vision of computing. In the vision, us software folks j…

A good chunk of that is unique to the swift part of xcode. Do the same things in an Objective-C codebase and you'll be surprised about how snappy and non-buggy everything is. I maintain today you could've gotten %80-%90 of the benefits of swift with a syntax refresh and add a few new cheap to compile features to Objective-C itself, like stronger nullbables and the ADT enums. I think the 'good enough software' stuff w…

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 conversation in the context of notion. Starting up Notion on my laptop feels like wading through honey. I really want to love notion, but every time I open it and try to do anything I find my motivation tricking away. Notion isn't even doing anything impressive with all that compute - its just slow. The sales pitch I make in my head for notion is that its a place to organize all my notes and workflows, but like Jira, living in notion means accepting that I work at the speed notion does, and that feels antithetical to the feeling of productivity I have in snappier, lighter tools like Bear and iA writer.

But Notion and XCode aren't really the problem. The problem is cultural. It seems to be the worst in the web ecosystem, though its not confined there. My favorite example of all is this issue in web3.js[1]. I can't help but play Benny Hill music in my head while I scroll through this 3 year old, apparently unsolvable issue thread.

When the new M1 macs came out lots of people were complaining that there's no 32 gig variant. Holy cow that is so many bytes. The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of ram. The NES ran super mario bros in 2kb. Its completely ridiculous to me that our software can even fill 16gb doing everyday computing. Is there a ceiling? Will there ever be a ceiling, or should we expect a document editor in 2030 to sit on 256gb of ram, just because thats how much ram modern javascript frameworks use by then?

[1] https://github.com/ethereum/web3.js/issues/1178#issuecomment...

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#97

Post by tracyhenry »

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#98

Post by novok »

josephg wrote: post #96
novok wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good chunk of that is unique to the swift part of xcode. Do the same things in an Objective-C codebase and you'll be surprised about how snappy and non-buggy everything is. I maintain today you could've gotten %80-%90 of the benefits of swift with a syntax refresh and add a few new cheap to compile features to Objective-C itself, like stronger nullbables and the ADT enums. I think the 'good enough software' stuff w…

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'll notice this in games where they do a lot of perf improvement work.

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.

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.

Re: UX Issues with Notion

#100

Post by SCLeo »

tracyhenry wrote: post #97

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 docume…

OP does not want to disallow their colleagues from a editing a page altogether. They want to prevent accidental edits.
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