First Impressions (pro's/cons)

context

  • long time and semi advanced notion user.
  • Use mainly for project management and knowledge base
  • Very light developer backgrond
  • UX research and design professional

cons

  • Name conventions hard to wrap my mind around. I somewhat understand object based databases but don’t use this daily.
  • Relationship between ‘home’ dashboard and my ‘human’ page is difficult to understand.
  • Losing ‘pages’ and objects only to find them under ‘recents’ is worrying and frustrating. After playing around with the software I wanted to create a clean slate and start from scratch and was left with visions of messy lost pages scattered throughout the system.
  • Not able to understand how to make what I would call relational database views within projects. E.g. I have a project object ‘gardening’ as a page and want display my ‘tasks’ related to this object on this page. I could not figure it out I know it’s possible, but for non-developers it doesn’t fit my mental model of using this.
  • The library header “Type every object” is misleading. The tooltip ‘Library’ helped me understand what the concept is.
  • The fact that ‘relations’ are under ‘library’ is extra cumbersome next to the docked ‘sets view’. It would be nice if the interface could better help refine the relationship between these.
  • Unable to hide template “Types”; after I create my own template I don’t need to see others very often.
  • I kept mistaking the Graph-view icon for dark/light mode

pro’s

  • familliar block feeling
  • visual aethetics is great
  • I later found the Vimeo introduction videos these are very high quality and pushed me through the first learning curve; perhaps add them to the software as tutorials, I didn’t find them immediately.
  • Pin code option is amazing as well as local storage offline first
  • home Dashboard opens up new way of combining content (that I am not familiar with)
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Thank you for your feedback @Milega
We are working towards to make “relational database” easier to work with for everyone. Hope you will see changes this quarter.
Can you share the moments that really grabbed your attention and clicked you like it if there are any of them.

The Look-and-Feel. When I started using Notion I was really impressed with the simplicity. Your design is fresh and modern.

Also your object-based product helped me reflect on how to improve my overall workflow freeing my workflow from Notions boundries.

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