Likewise, wouldn't you be baffled if you opened up a wikipedia article and found you were automatically editing it, and now you need to worry about making an accident every time you visit the site because you had no intentions of editing content, instead just consuming it.

But that's just because people are using the product in different modalities.

Are you using Notion as more of a live editor, where the documents are often short lived and transactional in nature? Or are you using it as a sort of permanent knowledge base and history?

The reality of the situation is that each modality commands different designs, and Notion generally tries to solve for all of them with single-minded design principles.

I think there's a strange fallacy in our industry of UX design which dictates that your product should resolve to simple design decisions or become convoluted configurable behemoths driven by the unending deluge of ad hoc decisions from customer asks - like there's no middle ground. Some designer is hopping up and down in a fit going, "but the user doesn't understand MY design principles!"

I feel like "tech" has ultimately failed in this regard.

You understand what the OP is complaining about is not the same as the scenario you presented, right?

I'm not even sure why you brought it up; is it to imply that _any_ 'friction' is bad? Is having to enter 'insert mode' in vi bad? No, of course not. For those that want it, that 'friction' provides value.

Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. I like the way it forces a moment of consideration of what’s there before I dive in. And iterative edit–review–edit cycles help me to keep making macro progress instead of fiddling with irrelevant details. (I’ve not tried Notion though.)

In an organization where one team is using notion and is using it to share docs to others that haven't gotten used to it yet, or where you constantly have new team members encountering it for the first time, locking widely shared pages is pretty important and easy to forget.

To be fair, when sharing google documents widely, one common practice is to make the shared version comment(/propose suggestion) only, and often to share the /preview link by default, so that you have to explicitly navigate to the editable version of the page.

This helps with performance and with accidental edits, and many popular documents still get weird suggestions that are clearly unintended.

Viewing a document on mobile is painful, since trying to scroll through the document often results in the app thinking I'm trying to edit the page.

I do think docs should default to read only mode on mobile to prevent this from happening.

I find the Google Docs feature to share a document and allow suggestions only to be very useful. It lets me, as the author, keep track of what’s going on.

Not if they were shared collaborative documents...

In those I would be baffled by the opposite...

Word (and friends) kinda has that. I'm not sure what the heuristic is, but in some circumstances it will put a message in the window title saying you need to save a copy of the current file before you can begin editing. I know it happens for downloaded documents, and that's about it.

I'd like to agree here, but I also find myself liking the fact that Docs has the "Viewing", "Suggesting" and "Editing" personas available for use. These options are intended to mirror Word's review features, but it also fits the idea of a "Start Editing" button, in my opinion.

There's times where I really like editing right away, but also being sure that I won't do any accidental edits. So yeah, I definitely agree that accidental edits are at the root of the problem for this.

Several months ago, I got so fed up with edit-by-default that I started a chat in the feedback thing in the lower-right. What I learned from that chat is that other people weren't using Notion the same way we are. We use it largely as a wiki & knowledge base; it hadn't occurred to me that other people aren't using it as a knowledge base, which is almost by definition read-heavy.

But I also want to point out that editable-by-default is exacerbated because other aspects of the UI have trained me to have behaviors that result in accidental edits.

----

Me:

> I'm sick of making accidental edits.

> 9 times out of 10, when I go to page it's to read it not to edit it. Editing is rare enough that when I want to do it I'm 100% down with having to click an "edit" button or something to explicitly switch to an editing mode.

> This isn't a permissions thing. I should be allowed to edit all of these pages. It's a UI thing that it's too easy to accidentally edit.

> This is an account-scoped problem. It shouldn't be broader; other people in the org shouldn't be affected by my preferences. It shouldn't be narrower; I don't want to have to configure this for each page.

> Many parts of the UI seem to be designed to cause accidental edits. Positioning the cursor at just the right spot can introduce an empty line. It's easy to accidentally drag something when highlighting text to copy. Clicking a link to another Notion page opens in the same tab normally, so I get in the habit of middle-clicking them to open in a new tab. But if it's an external link, then for some moronic reason middle-click doesn't open it (just use damn `<a>` elements! stop breaking the web!), and then I get middle-click paste (because X11) and I end up accidentally pasting some garbage in to the page-- _because of a behavior that other parts of the UI trained me to do_.

> I'm sorry for the rant, but it seems like such a basic thing, and it's been so frustrating.

> Like, my ideal resolution is you point out a setting on a page that I missed and I say "nevermind, cheers".

Gerard:

> (a lengthy reply explaining how to use page locks and database locks)

Me:

> Re: Page lock: That's not a solution, for a bunch of reasons that I'd tried to express in the original message:

> - I don't want to manage this for individual pages, that is error-prone and tedious; if there's a page that doesn't have it set, I won't notice that it's not set and risk making accidental edits. I don't want to have to remember to turn it back on after making an edit.

> - I don't want prevent others from editing it, just myself

> - I don't want others turning off the page lock to affect me. I don't want to have to train everyone to always set it after editing a page.

> Re: Database lock: I'm not sure about other parts of the org, but I don't really use database pages, so that's not of interest to me.

Winnie:

> Hello Luke,

> Winnie here, jumping in for Gerard. Thanks for sharing your thoughtful feedback!

> We don't currently have page setting that lets you be on a viewing mode and have some sort of prompt if you want to edit a page. It’s a legit use case, though, and definitely something we want to support in the future.

> This would totally help those that are creating wikis or knowledgebase, so I've passed this to our product team to take to heart for further improvements.

That's absolutely the default behaviour for Word when opening a Doc sent from somebody else ("enable editing"), and it does make sense like this.

The first rule of UX design: it’s not about you.

Perhaps OP isn’t Notion’s target audience, but dismissing something because you don’t share their perspective is not great.

Not at all. In fact I prefer the "viewing" mode in Google docs when I'm just reading a document written by someone else. Why would you want everything to be editable all the time? Usually docs are produced by one or maybe a few people and viewed by many more.

Can you run a report on how often folks lock-unlock-relook pages?

This should be a good proxy for how many people are hacking in a workflow to allow for explicitly entering edit mode.

I still don’t understand when which versions of half ass Markdown work when as I swap between Jira ticket bodies, Jira comments and Confluence.

Someone with a different background may have no problem with the text editing, because they're not used to anything substantially different, but may have an issue with another part.

It's great if we can take a step back and see the bigger picture, if there's more productivity overall, but perhaps the things you care about happen to line up with Notion well, where the author's didn't.

But it's a traditional wiki.

It really comes down to the oft-used expression, "do one thing, and do it well". People think they want a flying car, but once they try it they discover it's a bad car and a bad airplane.

Notion tries to do everything in one app - and for all users. To be fair, that last part is the fault of the user; if they can tell they are not the target audience, they should not use it. Unfortunately, it is such a "cool" app that the upper management audience falls for it and forces it upon the rest of the company.

So issue #1 is that it tries to replace too many other apps. But if you've used any of the apps it tries to replace, you will know what I mean.

If you write much, you will find Google Docs or even MS Word to be better.

If you use spreadsheets for more than just columns and rows to put basic text in, then you'll find Google Sheets or Excel to be better.

I haven't even bothered trying to use Notion as a database. I would bet real money that it would be a regretful experience.

If you use kanban boards, you'll most likely be happier with Trello or Jira or Asana or other organizer apps.

Issue #2 is about target audience and use cases.

If the target audience is developers, especially those who type quickly, they will suffer greatly. I don't want to sound condescending about other audiences, but from years of seeing "regular users" use software, I would say that slower actions and more (tedious) mouse clicking is already their way of working - so Notion is fine for them.

I'm not a UX researcher, but I believe part of their work involves measuring how users use software - which features are most used and which ones are least used; which UX behaviors are surprises that get in the way of the user; which features do users spend time looking for but never find; and so on.

Here are two specific examples - a small not awful but still obvious UX misfeature, and perhaps the worst usability behavior I face all the time:

The Change Icon feature when you click the icon of an item in the nav panel should not be initiated by clicking the icon of the item. The purpose of a nav tree is to navigate. It is not a place to edit items, at least not as first-class actions. Also, icons exist to help the user more quickly identify the thing they are looking for. The user is compelled to click on the icon as a means of choosing the nav item they want to open/expand down. But in Notion, clicking that icon pops up a Change Icon window. Other extra actions, like rename, delete, share, etc. are properly buried under an on-hover [...] popup menu, and change icon should be there as well. Incidentally, the icon in the nav item is between the expand > button and the Item Name. So even when trying to expand the tree, it is fairly easy to misclick and open the Change Item popup.

I reported that misfeature many times to them, even directly to one of their onboarding specialists for our company. As a developer, I am certain that moving that action to the [...] menu and making the icon have the same click effect as the Nav Item Text would be a small effort. That it hasn't been fixed yet tells me something bad about their management... because, in this case I know I'm not (just) a weird user. The frequency with which users will want or need to change nav item (usually a short name for the page) will be very low.

But my worst pain comes from the slash / character handling. When writing in a block, hitting the / causes a general action helper popup to open. If you type "In Elixir, we prefer cond or function pattern matching to if/else", you'll get a popup because of the /, and the popup will search for "else" within some list of actions. If you happen to be typing quickly, and if that if/else happened to be at the end of the block you were typing (such that you now hit return), then you'll get whatever action applied to the block or document state that was associated with that action.

In the if/else case, it happens to match on "Create Linked Database", and your return puts you on a new block which conveniently opens another popup to help you select a database from within the user databases in your Notion tree.

Oh also, the /else got eaten and is now gone; you may not notice, because you're now in a new block trying to decide how to undo this select database thing...

There are so many wild possibilities here. You can inadvertently apply H1 style to the block. You can insert an inline equation (with a convenient popup to type your eq into!). You can delete your whole block. To find out what all you could do, just type / and scroll down the list.

By the way, if you're in an inline code section `x = a / b you get that popup, and you can't ignore it by typing the closing `.

Here's the puzzle. Keyboard shortcuts are for power users. Keyboard shortcuts also usually require a modifier, unless you have a multi-mode editor like Vim. If a power user wants to use a keyboard shortcut, they will use it once they learn it. Most people, even casual users, know about CTRL-C/V, or at least CTRL-Z. Really simple users can still use the mouse to do things. It's just poor judgement to make a standard typed keypress to launch an action helper.

Furthermore, it begs the question of "What does Notion expect people to be putting into blocks?" I would have thought people would put mostly content, and then occasionally sprinkle some formatting or other goodies. Again, mouse-menu actions or modifier keyboard shortcuts could meet this need.

Lastly, I didn't really go into detail about why Notion is inferior to specialized apps, but I have zero doubt that I could take any typical Excel user and show them the Notion "spreadsheet" block and they would be frustrated to the point that they would give up. Take any writer and give them a Notion editor that interrupts their typing all the time, and they will give up too.

At my company, at least in my group, we occasionally write first and only in Notion. Notion is our official document store, but often we write first elsewhere and then copy paste (a whole other fail topic) into Notion, or most often we just put a link in the Notion page that leads the user to the real document in Gdocs.

I've seen several products now including Obsidian that seem to take markdown support quite literally, centering themselves around .md files and markdown presentation (### Heading 3), rather than simply markdown keyboard shortcuts and ability to export as markdown. Markdown has its place but its primarily for easy diffing in text-only content like code editors, or a human readable option for backing up content. Tools like Obsidian are essentially lightly tweaked code editors, not modern project-based editors the whole company can use.

I know of no other app which does what they do. Other apps do things like cmd-space (spotlight, which I use ALL the time), ctrl-space (which I have mapped instead of ctrl-b in tmux), shift-shift, which opens search in JetBrains IDEs, etc. Notion could have made cmd or ctrl-/ open that menu at the current cursor location. Adding that one modifier requirement would eliminate so much badness.

As it is now, if your /-whatever is at the end of a line, you're stuck with that popup (hit ESC or mouseclick elsewhere). They even act on the / key within an inline ` code block! So if you want to type a code sample, and you happen to use / toward the end and then hit return as you naturally would, you will in fact select any match in that popup. Who edits code and manually applies styles to auto-syntax-highlighted code?

You may like the slash feature, but I believe strongly that UX educated people would consider this user-hostile. At minimum it is a visual disruption. You can type right on past it and it may eventually go away, but as a user you have to learn to ignore it. It is also absolutely consuming resources while it is going search filtering on every keypress you make until it gives up and goes away. If all you do is use Notion, then it may not be noticeable. But if you are a dev with multiple projects open, multiple local servers running, and other load, you do not need apps that simply waste resources.

The mobile situation was much worse a year ago. We made big start time improvements by removing React Native and rebuilding our caching layer, but we still have a long way to go to beat Apple Notes. Using the Notion widget on iOS can really help with quick access for grocery lists.

On Android devices the situation is still not usable.

I think it's how they cache/request the pages. The slowness is usually in switching pages.

I think the part of Notion that most gives me this impression is the information architecture, which can be an extremely difficult thing to change once a significant number of users get to know a particular layout, and hasn't meaningfully changed since launch. Of all the writing tools I use, Notion's IA has always been the least straightforward.

Between the '...' menu and the Settings & members section, as well as several options like favorite, share, updates, and options on the sidebar, there's a lack of clear hierarchy and separation between account, workspace, page, or presentation options. This lack of clear hierarchy, combined with some product choices that apply at an unexpected level of hierarchy or permission model, means many actions exact capabilities are unclear or violate expectations of where they apply - account v workspace, workspace v page, and all users v me.

Take the top bar for example. From left to right:

1. Breadcrumbs: workspace & page

2. Share: workspace-specific (where can I share just an individual page? why is this separate from Copy Link?)

3. Updates: page-specific

4. Favorite: page-specific that either applies to the workspace or is a personal favorite (unclear, given "favorites" typically = personal, while "pin" = others see it)

5. '...' Menu: contains mostly page options with a few workspace ones (e.g. Import, possibly Export?). I even got confused about whether style options are personal (e.g my reading preference for font) or apply to the page style, given many writing tools allow this kind of style configurability as a user setting.

There's also duplication of options around the UI including Import, Favorite, Move To, New Page and Updates (how is this different than Page History?), which further leads to confusion about where to take what kind of action and clutter the interface.

The sidebar mostly makes sense as its all workspace-related. However, new users are likely to get tripped up on the difference between workspace name/icon and the root page name/icon, but this is a minor point.

Over in the Settings & Members section, you also have a mix of options that don't really meet expectations. The menu itself is launched from the sidebar, where workspace options are, but the menu also contains account settings, which is higher up in the hierarchy.

As far as product choices, one would expect notifications and connected apps to be workspace-based, as they are in other popular collaboration tools that use the same workspace patterns (like Slack/Discord), given that some workspaces I want to be watching closely or use particular accounts and others I don't. But these are instead account-based.

Logging in and out of workspaces is also in an entirely different section (the workspace picker), which is quite different from most apps where you tap your user icon and make account choices. Also in Settings & Members is Dark mode, floating on its own not even under account settings. Are there other personal presentation options? What if I have accessibility needs or want a bigger reading font?

The overall impression I have of Notion's IA is that it minimizes UI footprint to a point of lack of clarity and that its structure is buckling under a heavy feature load. This is a signal of graphic design having priority over UX. Rather than express clear hierarchies in layout, they're bundled together to save a bit of space (e.g. topbar) or to minimize the number of maintained pages (e.g. a dedicated Home / workspace page, account management page, global activity page, etc). These are the types of things that bite back quickly as you scale features and expand audiences.

For an example of a product that really nails information architecture, look at Trello. It's got a really clean UI separation between the hierarchies of cross-Board features (top nav), within-Board (sub nav), List (main canvas), and Card (modal). You always know where to find each action and what each does in their context. Coda is also halfway decent, if a bit feature-rich and ugly. I also wrote about my own experience refactoring OneSignal's IA to manage future feature growth here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/when-to-add-hierarchy/

So, I'm stuck using Bear for personal use only because I don't want to contaminate my personal time.

I personally use Keep for most "notes" and notion for "documents". Some of the documents are notes but they're long-form research / project documents.