Welcome to UXYZ’s first app critique for Notion: an all-in-one workspace used by Figma, Pitch, Loom, Duolingo, and many other great companies! Is Notion the best workspace for you? Looking till the end to see the answer!
Learn about Notion
What is Notion?
Notion is an all-in-one workspace for teams to share knowledge, update news and track progress.
How does Notion make money?
The basic plan for Notion is free, but it offers paid plans for advanced service.
Notion’s target user
The introduction of Notion implies that Notion’s main users are companies or startup teams. But many individual users also use Notion to manage their knowledge, notes, tasks and so on.
How does Notion support teamwork?
We think that Notion is a powerful collaborative tool for team knowledge, task and doc management. The three-in-one solution is attractive. But if the design for the three different use cases is not user-friendly, the app would not get applause from its users. So how does Notion support the three different purposes?
Notion for wiki: design for quick start and quick navigation
On the ‘Notion for wikis page’, it introduces this function as’ Your team’s long term memory, all in one spot’. Notion can be used to manage all kinds of information, from the latest news to the product roadmap.
We have to click back and forward to build the whole system of knowledge space in Google drive or Confluence. However, in Notion, users don’t need to go back to the upper level or the ‘home page’ to add a new branch.
We think that notion is a good tool for wiki because of its intuitive nested pages. In Notion, you can add pages in one page as easy as adding text and pictures. This function is genius because it makes initial documents system building and document searching easier.
Imagine that you are building a sharing workspace for a new team. At the very beginning, there are not many contents to add but only the structure of files and knowledge.
When using other group information management tools like google drive or confluence, we need to build a series of folders, files or pages for the initial construction. The construction is separate from the edit. We have to click back and forward to build the whole system in Google drive or Confluence. However, in Notion, users don’t need to go back to the upper level or the ‘home page’ to add a new branch.
Also, the side navigation bar of the pages is always on the page. It is easy to see where you are and quickly travel to any pages while editing.
Notion for projects&tasks
Notion regards tasks as something more complicated than title and description.
When we compared Notion with other tools that support tasks management, we found that Notion is special because it regards tasks as something more complicated than title and description. In Notion, a project can be a page that contains anything from a picture to another page. After clicking one task to learn more about it, you may find the goal of the task, the description, the subtasks, and even a file.
Another feature that surprised us is the filter. In Notion, people can add multiple properties(or, tags in our familiar context) to quickly filter and find one type of task.
Notion for notes&doc
Pretty WYSIWYG editor
The WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) editor is not a new thing for today. However, Notion’s beautiful documentation design still wins our hearts. The simple editing page, cute sans serif font and the intuitive interaction design(drag and drop) is helpful for writing.
Blocks for easier writing
Notion offers high freedom for notes for doc writing. People can add different blocks on one page.
Also, people can choose how to show the database block freely. It is easy to edit.
Design for the team
Templates for consistency
There are other features we found that is good for group collaboration. One of the features that support teamwork is Notion’s templates. By using the existing templates every time, the writer will not forget the most important items and the similar structure of writing will help all the group members stay on the same page.
Easy to share and comment with colleagues
Another thing is the easy sharing and comment feature. As for team collaboration, Notion and Google Docs are similar in the aspect of real-time collaboration and comments. Both products visualize the editing status of all editors, provide updated history and comments to be resolved.
Notion could be linked to slack and other tools. Once someone updates in Notion, other teammates will get a notice.
Consider privacy when sharing(compared with Google Drive)
While both Notion and Google drive provide sharing via email and could assign a specific permission level to each member, Notion only provides read/comment permission to anyone with the link, and Google Doc provides all different permission levels for link invitation.
By setting workspace members and groups in the workspace, Notion provides a quick way to assign different permission levels to different people on different pages. People can receive updating notification when
In comparison, Google Doc provides anonymous editing which Notion doesn’t provide, and is easier to spread since anyone with the link could have editing permission.
All-in-one makes Notion unique
Notion successfully solve my pain point, it is really a good tool for team collaboration.
My friend who highly recommends Notion to me said ‘Notion successfully solve my pain point, it is really a good tool for team collaboration.’ She started to use Notion as a remote collaboration work tool recently. A team project is more complicated than you thought, so it is important to leave space for customization. Notion does a good job on it.
Other features we like in Notion
All of us like the idea of using emoji to bring relaxation to the workplace. Also, emoji makes it easier to search for a page.
Is Notion a perfect tool?
Although Notion is such a good tool for teamwork, there are still somewhere we think could be improved:
- The high learning threshold may lead to the loss of new users.
It takes time to learn meanings of concepts like page, block, property and so on. The minimalist style UI design is beautiful, but the lack of explanation causes trouble when learning how to use the app.
“I felt like it needs a lot of time to learn how to use it.”
- Some interaction is not intuitive
For example, when adding a web link to my note, people expect to jump to the webpage when clicking it. But it starts editing the link.
- Hard to import long contents
Notion is a good tool for team collaboration, but it is hard to import and edit long content in Notion. First, when paste paragraphs to Notion, the paragraphs will become blocks. Users cannot select several blocks, so it may cause trouble for editing.
Also, Notion doesn’t have a side outline or thumbnail, so it is hard to navigate on a long page. If we build a new article in Notion, the lack of outline is acceptable because of the nested page structure. But for a team that already has a management system or people who want to move their notes to Notion, it is hard to transfer to Notion.
- Notion is not the best notetaking tool
When we first tried Notion as individual users, we were disappointed because we felt Notion is not as good as heard as a notetaking tool.
For example, the well-designed templates are good for a team to keep consistency, but for individual users, it is time-consuming to fill in the blanks of a beautiful template. Also, when creating a new note, starting from a white paper is much easier than starting from an existing template.
The template feature is good for teamwork but not convenient for individual users. The learning curve Notion is steep. It is acceptable for a team because of many good features for teamwork, but individual new users may give up using it in a short time. It is so hard for an individual person to start in Notion compared to Evernote, Bear, and other notetaking apps.
Is Notion the best workspace for you?
Come back to the title question, we think that Notion is a good workspace for new teams, but not so good for teams that already have the shared workspace to transfer or individual users.
Reflection
At the beginning of the app critique, we found that Notion is such a confusing app. But later, we realized that we are not Notion’s target users. One takeaway for app critique is:
We may not be the target users of the app.
Also, we have a controversial question left. When looking at the reviews, we saw that some critical reviews are from individual users. Here we have a question left for discussion:
Shall we design for users that are not the target users?
We will appreciate if you leave your thoughts in the comment!
