[jitl]

(Disclaimer: I work on Notion)

To me, the most interesting feedback here is that seamless-editable-by-default is a negative for this user, and as a work-around, this organization locks/unlocks every page. This is surprising to me because I find content locks and editing friction very annoying. For example I used Quip for many years, which locks any block currently being edited by someone else, which can be quite frustrating when someone happens to have an idling cursor in a random position. Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs? But it’s an interesting perspective to consider especially for users coming from Confluence, where editing has much more ceremony, and more generally for read-heavy wiki use case. In any case, it’s really the accidental edits at the root of the problem.

Like many other commenters, my biggest pain point is page load speed.

[gravity13]

>Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

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.

[polote]

Notion is a not a good tool to create a knowledge base, the same way Google drive is a not a good tool to create a knowledge base.

If you think a bit more, notion is more or less a Google drive with smileys. Which is not a critic.

[bobbylarrybobby]

That Notion 1. Naturally embeds documents within other documents (and not within some containing folder) and 2. makes linking to other documents seamless, makes it a totally different beast from google docs

[porker]

What have you found is a good tool to create a knowledge base, at a small to medium sized company?

[maccard]

With all it's warts, confluence is pretty good. It's not good software, it runs like ass, has a crappy markdown editor. But it supports attachments, has a great jira integration, solid-ish markdown rendering, hierarchal pages, multiple projects, separated viewing and editing paradigms. But it's still confluence.

[noahtallen]

A WordPress website with Jetpack search is surprisingly good — we use something like that at Automattic. All long-lived documentation goes in the “fieldguide” website, and it’s open (and encouraged) for anyone to add or edit pages.

[polote]

Confluence, the product is very far from perfect, but still does the job well. I'm working on building the perfect knowledge base tool, but that would be for big companies

[gravity13]

I've seen good use with Slab

[iamacyborg]

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

This is what happens when you start designing products for the lowest common denominator and weigh quantitative feedback above qualitative.

[switz]

> For example I used Quip for many years, which locks any block currently being edited by someone else, which can be quite frustrating when someone happens to have an idling cursor in a random position.

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.

[systemvoltage]

This is the typical "clealiness/minimalism/frictionless above everything else" paradigm in design circles that needs to die a horrible death. It's like we don't think anymore and instead blindly follow like a bunch of mind washed design-zombies that have been instructed by the god of minimalism to make everything look/feel clean.

[ethbr0]

The problem is that minimalism / cleanliness requires targeting specific use cases. You boost the usability of some, at the cost of complicating (or eliminating) others.

But what do I know? I still think context menus + hotkeys are a pretty great compromise.

[wolco2]

In vi the insert mode concept is so foreign it creates friction for the beginner and is one of the bigger hurdles.

[callumlocke]

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

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.)

[hombre_fatal]

Interesting. I'd like that for Notes.app which is my go-to example for how transparent autosave + always-editable can fail catastrophically.

Once I had a very long list in Notes.app that I'd been maintaining over a few years. One day while scrolling it on mobile, I somehow replaced the entire document with some stray input, and by the time I noticed, undo couldn't restore it. Though I was able to recover it because my laptop (which Notes.app will sync to) hadn't yet connected to the internet.

[rad_gruchalski]

> Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least.

Same in google docs mobile app. Edit button in the bottom right corner.

[jitl]

I agree that in touch this makes more sense because edit and scroll use identical inputs (drag finger over document)

[bcherry]

It definitely depends on the purpose of the document. But I do find that people who are not experienced with notion will accidentally edit anything and everything that isn't locked if you share it with them.

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.

[jitl]

This is good feedback! Thank you.

[tracyhenry]

Do you really need to "lock" it as in OP? When you share you get the option to choose whether the person being shared can edit, comment or duplicate. If you disallow sharee editing, you can still edit your document.

[kyawzazaw]

I want some people to edit some parts only.

[tracyhenry]

> some people Y you can configure access rights for each person you shared the page with.

> some parts Some parts of a page? I don't get this. Get that part into a nested page then?

[joshuamorton]

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

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.

[enjoiful]

I'm thoroughly in love with Notion and how it's changed our company for the better.

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.

[amluto]

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

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.

[coldtea]

>* Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?*

Not if they were shared collaborative documents...

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

[cuddlybacon]

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

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.

[jerieljan]

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

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.

[boringg]

++ biggest pain point is page load speed. Glad its on the radar as suspected. Appreciate the tool though - thanks!

[LukeShu]

What you call "seamless-editable-by-default" is my biggest frustration with notion; I wouldn't characterize it as "seamless-editable" though, I'd characterize it as "accidental edits". Like the OP, my org has taken to locks/unlocks all the time. (And this is extra frustrating, because the load on "unlock" is often worse than the actual page load!)

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.

[rickyc091]

The reason I prefer Notion over wikis is because you don't have to click edit to modify a page.

[smoldesu]

I enjoyed the time I had with notion, but ultimately it didn't feel "worth it" to keep around. The free tier is too restrictive, and while I preferred the premium experience, the price was ultimately much too high to stomach.

[bobbylarrybobby]

They recently upped the free tier to have unlimited blocks. I think the only restrictions on it now are uploaded file size limits

[fattybob]

Yes and it’s prompted me to give it another go, already stalled once in it though, but still toying with it...

[krsdcbl]

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word

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.

[myguysi]

> This is surprising to me because I find content locks and editing friction very annoying.

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.

[jamil7]

I’m sure it’s been discussed internally but would a rich API for third-party developers to build alternative clients, integrations or plugins ease some of these issues? I can see situations where a simple plugin could help companies to paper over parts of Notion that don’t perfectly fit their workflows. If a company prefers a read heavy workflow they can modify some behaviour.

[perryizgr8]

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

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.

[wikibob]

Hopefully you have detailed page click analytics available to you?

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.

[kyawzazaw]

We used it for live discussion in college lasses and our text being edited out by another person was very annoying