UX Issues with Notion
When I read people like or love Notion, I wish I could watch them use it.  Obviously they are doing things very differently than I do...<p>Typing latency while writing or editing a page is really high (bad).  Every keypress you do, must be going through a long chain of &quot;what can we interpret the user to be wanting ?&quot; questions.  Guess what!? The user is probably just trying to fucking type!  Special features and options should be hotkey activated, not &quot;smart&quot; default deduced.<p>The afore-mentioned smart typing is 99% wrong or in the way.  Typing slash ( &#x2F; ), for any reason apparently, and in any context, pops up the Basic Blocks selection window.  If you type, for example, &quot;10 &#x2F; 2 = 5&quot;, or perhaps &quot;a&#x2F;b testing&quot;, or any other very common valid use of the slash symbol, you are left with that stupid popup on the screen.  You have to hit ESC to close it.  Pity the fool who has a touchbar Mac.  And if for some reason you wanted to end your line with a slash, and you hit return after typing that &#x2F;, the popup eats the slash and puts you in a new block below.<p>I could go ON and ON with examples.  It actually feels like this app was designed for people who only use one finger to type and the other hand driving a mouse all day.<p>Oh one last tidbit.  You know how people put icons on buttons and other things to help you identify them quickly, hopefully to make it easier for you to click and get what you want?  Notion has a clever fuck you to all those users.  If you use the navigation tree panel, and you see the item you want - especially because you quickly recognized its icon - and you click it (the icon), do you get the item you wanted?  No, of course not!  You get a handy Change Icon popup.  Now not only do you not know if you found the item you wanted (since you didn&#x27;t get to see its associated page), but instead you now have to dismiss that popup.  Clicking that icon should have done exactly the same thing as clicking the text beside it: open the damned content associated with that thing.<p>Now, maybe you want to copy a link to that item.  How do you do that?  That&#x27;s in the hidden&#x2F;hover [...] button for the item.  That&#x27;s fair.  And that&#x27;s where the change icon action should be.<p>There&#x27;s so much wrong with this app that I sometimes wonder if this isn&#x27;t an enormous practical joke - like the people who write completely nonsensical research papers just to prove how broken the research publishing system is; this joke is for the VCs and the shiny-toy users.<p>&#x2F;rant