Don’t be addicted to Notion
Please don’t misunderstand. This article is not to blame notion, rather, for advocacy.
Intro
Notion is a great product, as the matter of fact, one of my favorite SaaS, which I promote to my colleagues, acquaintances, and everyone. Speaking of, if you haven’t tried Notion, go for the link below and try it. You can get Notion credit $10 then.
https://www.notion.so/?r=c68e054952d14f0e9ccbf355bca2b509
Anyway, the point is, Notion is the great, unprecedented product yet the reason why people use product is to achieve their goals, not using product itself.
Enlightenment is even more complicate than expected
This article is made from my experimental, tormenting side project to make Notion template which can help my colleague work effectively. There’s a lot more to it than my eyes met before.
Aside from crafting Notion template based on grasping my colleague’s work flow, there are more jobs for this side project — preparing for Notion introducing session to my colleague and making some material to explain what is Notion and how it works to help us.
And here’s the most important straight goods — Enablement to make people use Notion is the toughest part. I’ve got to face the ironic problem — Why some people feel difficult to use Notion, not like others, I’ve met before a lot, to say Notion is easy product to make their goal?
This is such a blind spot, which I’ve never been aware. Notion is blowing away Silicon valley and South Korea too. Same goes to me and I quickly adopt Notion to write code, clip web and communicate.
Moreover, the people around me who interact in Notion community positively find how to use Notion in more effective ways and don’t feel the huddle to get to know it. However, what if the other people out of this kinds of folks? They feel easy to Notion, even though they really need the function that Notion can serve?
In that sense, This article is not just for Notion. I’d like to write my experience to find the answer of the question — Why Notion is easy for someone yet difficult to others and the lesson learned from this side project.
A lot of features don’t guarantee a lot of usage
A huddle Notion new starters face is this — they can make everything using Notion so they can’t figure out what they should do. There’s many use cases of Notion like recruiting announcement, CRM, personal diary, and even development communication(using Notion code import feature)! And it could be possible someone make another usage of Notion too.
It means, Notion efficacy highly depends on users’ knowledge and capability to use Notion. Definitely different user experience from MS powerpoint, which has just one purpose to use, presentation. Ironically the most innovative characteristic of Notion, freedom, becomes a huddle too.
Obviously, there are some people who love to get to know new tools and have job like that for living but others who do not. And “others” don’t ask like “As for Notion, is that possible to define filter and sorting method on each view? And I’d like to learn all kinds of functions Notion serve!”
They say “Oh, look good. So how much is that?” or “So how much ROI after adopting Notion?” or “I just need to note. Tools don’t care.” Rather, They would not ask anything. We all know it’s quite busy to live nowadays so don’t want to learn something that seems to have no keen relationship to my working result like sales KPI.
What product managers should focus on is…
All user doesn’t need to be a guru of software they use. It’s enough for them to know the basic features they should know for their business goal and get what they want.
That’s why product managers should help people use a product seamlessly, especially users who don’t make much expertise of software tools but use in part. Product mangers can craft tutorials, in-app usage contents, templates which users don’t need to build but easy to fill data in, or anything to explain and persuade the usefulness of the product meeting their eye level.
Technology had better be catalyst to communicate people, not isolating.
