Power of Notion. Overview and 🎁 bonus template for a design project
Important notes: I don’t have any relation to Notion, I’m just the guy who loves this tool and wants to elaborate about my love in this article. And I want to thank Bogdan Yemets for a huge help with this article.
Intro
Good afternoon. If you are here, you are most likely a designer familiar with Notion and looking for some experience with this beautiful tool.
In this article, I will cover some thoughts why Notion is superb, how I use it in everyday life, and I will share the template for a small design project which I created and tested during the OffGrid design school for the team of 5 people (2 mentors and 3 students).
Hope you would like it 🙃
How I met your Notion
The story
Kids, in my previous work in the design team, consisted of 2 people we used many different tools — Google Docs, Google Sheets, Trello, Dropbox, Miro, Invision, Sketch and Apple notes for different purposes: documentation, reports, estimates, CJMs, IAs, simple notes, etc. It was okay, but to be true — the variety of tools drove us crazy.
After we switched to Figma, our toolset shrank (that’s another long story 😉), but before that we were about to discover the Power — accidentally, I noticed a fancy application on my friend’s macbook and asked what it was.
That app was called Notion, and I felt a powerful sympathy (sorry, I don’t believe in love at first sight 🙃).
The first look
I’ve taken a look and was happy at first glance. I mean, I saw an excellent minimalistic design, a dark theme, a rich variance of text markup, some basic tables, kanban boards, a calendar, etc.
I’ve asked my friend:
— So, it means I can create a paragraph, then add a table with competitors and below that kanban board with action items I need to do? And each row and card is a page?”
— Yes.
Well, that sounds awesome! It’s worth spending some time to get more familiar with this tool. And my mind started visualizing great dashboards, incredible layouts and resolving all current frustrations caused by a large number of tools.
What is Notion
We’re more than a doc. Or a table. Customize Notion to work the way you do.
states on Notion’s homepage and that is true 🦾
The basis 🍉
The main distinguishing principle of Notion is the block structure of pages. And even the page itself is the block. Everything in Notion is the block: text, title, quote, table, table row, callout, board, image, etc.
From different blocks you create your workspace, like Lego in childhood or like auto layout components in Figma today.
Block — is a power of Notion 🍉
Templates
Besides blocks, Notion has plenty of templates for different aims, roles and scenarios, which you can use for your own. Let’s check design templates. Here is a list:
🚘 Roadmap
🔬 User research
🎒 Task list
✏️ Meeting notes
🖊 Design system
🎯 Company goals
And let’s be honest — Notion did a good job of creating different cases with approximate data to see use cases, but the most valuable part of these templates I see as an inspiration for a huge progressive workspace with different relations in databases.
Databases
You could notice one similar detail in the templates presented above — they all are built as databases. And that is what elevates Notion to a level above of the note-taking applications.
Databases are a collection of pages with different properties and can be visualized as you want. There are six ways to demonstrate a database:
- Table
- Board
- Calendar
- Timeline
- List
- Gallery
And that’s not all. Everything is connected in Notion. You can customize the same database with:
- different types of visualization;
- showing and hiding properties;
- filtering and sorting by property values.
Block and database — are a true power of Notion 🍉
Linked databases
Notion also allows you to create linked databases. Linked databases are similar to a father component and instance in Figma. For example — you create a calendar on page A and then go to page B and create a new calendar linked to the first one. All changes are visible on both sides.
Advanced properties
You can do amazing things with databases. It’s like a fire that Prometheus gave to humans. But that is not all!
I went deeper and deeper into properties rabbit hole and found there are not only simple ones, like text, number, date, etc., but there are also advanced ones, and this is where the magic begins ✨.
Formula
If you want to feel yourself a developer — welcome! With the help of basis operators and functions, you can customize this field as you wish.
Relation
This property allows you to select pages from different databases and creates dependencies between databases.
Rollup
Works only with relations. Allows you to manipulate with page properties previously selected for relation from another database.
How I use Notion
To understand better the power of all features mentioned above, I will show you an example from my life. I made a recipes page, but not unusual. I have four databases there:
- Nutrition info database — a table with nutrition information per 100 g (sorry guys from the US and UK 😅) of products I eat the most
- Ingredients database — a list of products I need for a particular meal where I fill in the required weight. Products are being selected from the Nutrition info database, and when I set weight, it calculates the appropriate nutrition info.
- Recipe database — a recipe with a rollup property from Ingredients that calculates the total weight and total nutrition of a meal
- Menu database — calendar where I add recipes to the day card, and it calculates my total nutrition for the day.
So basically, I’ve built a food tracker in Notion 🍏 And you can build too if you want.
Block, database, advanced properties and linked database — are an absolute power of Notion 🍉
Other examples
Let’s switch to simplified cases 😅 Here are a few examples of how I use it for everyday life:
Travel
I gather all needed info about locations, bookings, and, most importantly, spending. They all have categories, and I can see after each trip how much I spend on each category. This info helps me compare category spending in different regions and plan the budget for the next trip.
Design
Of course, I made a wiki for UX. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s still in progress 🙂
Books
Books collection with insights from book on each database book page.
Vinyl
I’m collecting vinyl, and this page helps me check what I already have and don’t need to buy. Also, this is a good hint for my friends who want to gift me a vinyl.
I haven’t mentioned one thing about Notion yet — regular feature updates and performance improvement. Good to see that team always is working to improve usability, performance and new features.
Template for designers
And now, with all that information in mind, I can finally show you the workspace I’ve created and tested on a group of students.
Case
Imagine we have a project — a new application with a grocery list because there is a huge gap in the market and there are no list applications in the world.
👉🏽👉🏼👉🏻 💠 Design project workspace template 👈🏻👈🏼👈🏽
Let’s have a closer look at each block.
🛣 Roadmap
Epics are decomposed by tasks. For each epic added design phase that can be collapsed and expanded to save space. The timeline gives you the main status of the project.
Each epic is estimated by calculation of estimated related tasks and each epic page contains board with tasks from the selected epic.
☑️ Tasks
Most used board of the project. Kanban view for a current sprint with a helpful filter: view only your tasks or tasks for each team member.
Important table with all tasks with additional views of tasks in different statuses.
Each task has relation to epic and sprint, estimation, priority and asignee.
🏃🏻 Sprints
Calendar view with one-week sprint (for demo purposes). Each sprint has an estimate calculated by estimated tasks.
Calendar view abilities allow adding helpful information about team members’ leave for different occasions. This information helps us understand sprint capacity much better.
Also, each sprint card contains a kanban with all tasks from that sprint.
Sidebar
📋 Documentation — pretty self-explanatory helpful sidebar where you can store all needed files, reports and links all in one place.
✏️ Notes — list database with important notes you take during calls. Most likely, you would use a lot, and some additional categorization with filter views would be helpful.
🙏🏻 And this is design template in Notion 🙏🏻
Other templates
I’ve found other articles on Medium with helpful Notion templates for designers:
- 3 Templates for Your Next Testing with Users by Slava Shestopalov 🇺🇦
- How to Conduct a User Research Analysis in Notion by Lari Niehl
- The ultimate Notion template to run efficient usability tests by Inês Duvergé
A spoonful of tar in a barrel of honey
If you still remember, there is the word “Overview” in the article name. It would not be objective to talk only about the good sides of Notion. As everything in this world, Notion is not ideal.
High thresholds
It may look like an easy tool, but due to its waste functionality, Notion has a high entry threshold, and you may need some time to study resources to become an advanced Notion user. Here are some of them for you to start:
- Guides and tutorials on official Notion page
- Official Notion Youtube channel
- Notion subreddit
- Notion Vip — tutorials from advanced users with advanced pages
You still need some extra tools
Remember how you can switch between different database types? Like the switch from table to calendar. This is really cool and powerful on the one hand, but on the other hand you won’t have:
- such flexibility and charts that are in Google Sheet or Excel
- recurring events as in calendar apps
Most likely, Notion would never have these features due to the specifics of databases.
But! Recently Notion released the new block — simple table (not a database), similar to what we have in Excel. Maybe this is the beggining? 🤔
Online only
Unfortunately, without a connection you won’t be able to create content. There is a lot of rumors Notion team next priority is an offline mode so let’s wait for it. Previous experience showed that the team brings new features on a regular basis.
A trap of the dashboard layout
The advantage of Notion is that you can create your own layout. And this is also the weakness and trap, the trap of time. I’ve seen a lot of complaints from Reddit users they spent more time creating home dashboards than using their dashboards.
Be aware of it! This can happen because the more choices you have, the harder to choose, and Notion gives you many variants of how you can build your dashboards.
Mobile experience
A controversial claim because Notion is more a desktop-oriented tool because of it’s complexity. But the mobile app has all desktop features. Sometimes mobile experience could be frustrating if you want to create a large database or play with the layout.
Apple notes is much much pleasure to work in. Mobile Notion is more for reading or adding notes rather than setting kanban board for a new sprint. But, would you set a new sprint in Jira from mobile?
Summary
In general, Notion is a great tool for day-to-day life and project management. However, the ideal tool for all your needs does not exist in this world. There always will be limitations, and you will need to find applications for individual narrowly focused aims.
My main idea of this overview is to state that:
in right hands and advanced tool usage Notion can be the operating system of your life.
And this is the true absolute power of Notion 🍉
