How I use Notion as a Repository for the UX Process

Mario Merino Granados
Erretres Insights
Published in
4 min readJul 17, 2018

As a brand and product designer, I want to keep my entire work process in a single place where I can consult everything. When I first started with UX design processes, I realised that there were many tools (Trello, Mural, Invision Freehands, etc.), which made it hard to conglomerate everything just as I’d like.

Three months ago, a friend of mine told me about Notion, a simple tool full of possibilities, with which you can create and customize a workspace and organize all your work as you wish. The first time I saw it, I knew that it would save me hours of work in my UX design processes.

How I prepare my workspace

To stay organized, I like to have a different workspace for each part of my life; a personal one, a work one, and one for personal projects.

Let’s see how I have customized my personal project workspace, taking a concept travel app I’m working on as an example.

As you can see, I separate the content of my workspace in two parts:

  1. Daily, where I have my Kanban Board
  2. Process, where I have a different page for each UX step I make

In this way, I have direct access to my list of to-dos and to each of the phases of the working process.

Using emojis is not just about the aesthetics, but it also helps me search faster for an exercise, as I recognise them at a glance (so millennial, I know).

Making a Kanban Board in Notion

Every organised person needs a Kanban board in their life and in Notion, you can have your own, and you won’t lose any of the functionality that Tello has. You can assign work to collegues, comment on entries, etc.

To create it you just need to add a new page using the Task & Issues Template, and customize it with the columns you want in your Kanban board.

Making a Canvas (Lean UX, Survey, etc) in Notion

One thing you can’t do in Notion is assign an image as a background and work over it, which makes it difficult to work on a canvas as in real life, but there is always a solution to every problem. I realized that making a Task & Issues page and assigning every column to a space in the canvas solves this issue. Now you only have to fill it with your digital post-its, or “Entries”.

Personas and Proto Journeys in Notion

You can make your UX Personas just by making columns, adding a photo and creating toggles for the information of each one.

For Proto Journeys I haven’t come up with a solution yet, so if someone has one please let me know! At the moment I’m doing them on Mural and exporting them into Notion as a JPEG. It works for me because what I want is to have everything saved in the same place, rather than making everything in a single place.

Interviews, Surveys, Research

For these kind of pages I just use Notion like your typical text editor. Putting all my Interviews and Survey Insights together always helps.

Conclusions

Personally, this is the best method I’ve used for keeping all my UX design process together, and I feel that I’m working much faster since I started using it. I hope that it helps someone, and if you have any suggestions please let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

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