How well-designed is Notion?
A large body of human productivity has moved from the physical world to the digital world. Something Peter Drucker calls “knowledge work”. With this, how we organize our work has also changed. Like how the desktop metaphor was used to seamlessly transition between the physical desk and the computer, the next transition is moving the entire workspace from the physical world into the digital world.
Remote work is more popular than ever and in terms of individual productivity, with the use of technology, a single employee can accomplish more than an entire team could a couple of decades ago.
Along with this immense power, humans still don’t have an expanded memory. They can use their memory lesser due to search engines and what not, but the way we organize information in our brains is a bottleneck.
There’s two aspects to the “workspace”. Managing information, and managing tasks. Apps like Evernote, Boostnote and all the other notes applications try to solve the first problem. A site-specific wiki also works on the same issue. On the other hand, apps like Todoist, Trello, Asana, try to solve the task management side. Most of these revolve around a Kanban board of some sort.
Notion attempts to solve both these issues at the same time. And when any app tries to do many things at once, the user experience gets shot in the kidney.
I’ve been using Notion for more than a year now. I essentially use it as a second brain to store all the information that I think I need to remember, but don’t trust my physical brain to hold onto.
Affordances and Signifiers
From what I can gather, Notion mostly runs on TypeScript. Which works really well in a browser, but it also essentially works as a progressive web app, meaning it can run on any device with a small wrapper.
There’s a good-side and a bad-side to this. The good-side is that it can run on almost any device and it affords different forms of interaction. The bad-side is, it doesn’t feel like an app when you’re running it on a mobile device and that can be slightly frustrating.
This creates functional issues like the lack of caching which affects the user experience. When you’re using an app, users get slightly annoyed when the page has to re-load every time they have to open it especially if they’re switching between two different pages.
In terms of signifiers, Notion does a really good job. Everything that can be interacted with/edited is highlighted in some manner on mouse-over or when the mouse is near that area.
This translates to always knowing what can be changed and what cannot. More often than not, because Notion is so modular, almost everything can be edited and the constant feedback is useful and necessary.
Discoverability and Understanding
Notion uses this single page to let users know about the basic functions of Notion. Although having the need for a get started guide is seen as a red-flag for discoverability and understanding, this is mainly due to how Notion employs the use of a block editor. And the base interactions are something most users might not be familiar with. Personally, I haven’t had any trouble with discovering/understand what Notion can do. I’ve never had to Google something frantically to understand whether I can do it or not.
Notion also has helpful start-up templates that display the power of the base building blocks in Notion. They also constantly add new templates based on the usage patterns that they notice. This tells me that they do a lot of user research to understand how their users use the app.
Usability
Notion shines in this area. Notion attempts to integrate Kanban boards, databases, tables, media and information organization into one app. And the template gallery above should give you a fair idea about how Notion can be used in various different scenarios. The base building blocks are also robust enough to accommodate other use cases.
Utility
As with any app that gives you a lot of tools to accomplish what you want, Notion has a small learning curve. And the steepness of that learning curve depends on how you want to use Notion. If you intend to use Notion as a note-taking app, the learning curve is really flat. But if you intend to use it as a deep well-connected database of information, the learning curve is steeper. This translates into the utility of the app also having a curve. The more you hope to accomplish with the Notion, the more utility it provides. More often than not, once you set up something in Notion, you realize how you can’t do that in any other app. And that, in my opinion, is a huge utility win.
Notion also has a lot of integration options including Google Drive, Trello, Evernote and so on. This heavily adds to the utility of the app as it doesn’t force the people you’re working with to use Notion if they don’t want to and that’s the major hurdle while moving to a new app.
Functional Integrity
As I explained in the Affordance section, the fact that it’s a progressive web-app leads to some unfortunate, mildly frustrating experiences. Page reloads every-time you open something is not something anyone wants.
Notion has the ability to store your page offline. Which means that caching the pages isn’t impossible. But even when the pages are offline, there’s a slight lag when you open a page. And that affects the trust that you build with an app when it’s consistently quick and reliable.
This can be fixed by introducing the ability to cache effectively and not re-load pages every single time.
Visual Design
For an extremely functional app, Notion looks really good. In-spite of having loads of information on a single page, the block editor ensures that there’s no unfortunate typography and the ability to switch between a light mode and a dark mode makes everything visually pleasing and clean.
Personally, I like the dark mode as it looks swankier. Notion also adds the option to add an image header to every page. This is a nice break, away from the usual boring layouts in every other notes app.
Persuasiveness
This is a hard one to judge Notion on. Like any app that attempts to be a tool, the persuasiveness depends on the user. Photoshop can’t persuade a user to edit all his photos, but when a user wants to edit a photo, it presents everything that’s needed. And Notion is similar. As seen in all the screenshots, when I started writing book summaries for everything that I read, I couldn’t step away from Notion. And every time I read a dense non-fiction book now, I need Notion in the background to put my thoughts down. I assume this is the case for other tasks as well. When you start using it for a particular function, Notion persuades you to stick to it for that particular function.
Is it well designed?
I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with notes apps. For a while I had Evernote and Trello working in conjuncture. I then moved onto Boostnote and Trilium to build custom templates for the things that I wanted to do in personal knowledge base. I was positively obsessed with organizing the information that I was consuming into a usable hierarchy and nothing filled that void effectively.
Since I’ve started using Notion, that void has disappeared and that’s a major reason why I’ve continued to use it consistently for such a long time. Maybe this counts as a bias and it deems my critique as invalid, but nevertheless, I do believe that Notion is well-designed.
