#NOTION SOFTWARE FULL#
#NOTION SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#
#NOTION SOFTWARE FREE#

But don’t make them remember obscure shortcuts unless they are “trained” by popular apps or your app.

#NOTION SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#

Check out the experience on popular software such as Notion, Figma, and Superman. If they need to use the mouse, they should ideally be able to hit the shortcut keys with the other hand. Shortcuts will allow them to do things within your app more quickly. If your users need to type with both hands, switching to using the mouse is a hassle. Reduce switching between the keyboard and the mouse so that your users can move quickly.If I were to try to abstract general principles out of Notion’s UI, they would be: But you need to understand the principles behind them to build great software. Creating a new column in Notion UI principles for the 2020sĬopying the exact UI can help you make your software UI good quickly. The columns will have the same width but you can adjust them. Each Notion block takes up the whole width, and you can drag and drop a block beside another block to get two (or more) columns.

#NOTION SOFTWARE FULL#

messy) and “each block takes up the full width” (i.e. Mailchimp's drag-and-drop email builderĪlso, Notion found a good middle ground between “I can put things anywhere” (i.e. With Notion’s slash command, I can easily add and edit a block by hitting a few keys. I have to drag a block across the screen, then click to edit the block, and then hit “Save & Close”. I was “trained” by Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop email builder. Shortcut hint in Notionĭrag and drop has been around for a long time but Notion made it better. If I use the command often enough, I will learn the shortcut, even if it is obscure. But, at the same time, Notion tries to “train” me to remember shortcuts by showing me the shortcuts alongside the commands. This is way better than remembering obscure shortcuts because I can type “picture” and still get the “image” command. What I love is I do not even need to lift my hands off my keyboard. Users use the command palette to navigate around the app or take “global” actions much more quickly. The CMD+K command palette is essentially the same concept but for the entire app.

I can simply type “/” to get a list of commands and type additional text to narrow down the options. The slash command concept probably came from Internet Relay Chat (IRC) but has since been popularized by Slack and then adopted by many other tools. It felt so obvious that I was wondering, “why couldn’t we do this before?” Notion's markdown formatting shortcuts I was first introduced to markdown formatting while using Dropbox Paper at Buffer. Here are some of the UI patterns you should adopt (read: copy) because your users will be expecting them. Keyboard shortcuts are obscure combinations of keys. Most things are hidden behind several layers of menus. That was nice when personal computing was new. Microsoft Office is pretty much the standard for software UI since. Very quickly, Notion’s UI will become the new UI standard for most software. Notion has been “training” the next generation with its UI.

#NOTION SOFTWARE FREE#

Some are even paying for it (while the working adult behind this blog post is still on the free plan). Taking notes, creating websites, building apps. When my co-founder Swee Kiat was interviewing university students for startup ideas, almost everyone he spoke to is using Notion-for everything and anything. There is an entire economy around Notion.īut more importantly, the next generation of builders and creators are growing up with Notion. But nobody raves about them like they do with Notion. Yes, Zoom, Slack, and Canva might have a lot more users (for now). There are countless self-initiated Facebook groups, some with tens of thousands of members.įew software companies have such growth and enthusiasm for their product.Its subreddit has more than 200,000 members, ~8x of Figma’s and ~80x of Canva’s.Notion’s user base grew from one million users in 2019 to four million in 2020, to… wait for it… 20 million in 2021.It is also because a whole generation is growing up using Notion. That alone is not enough to become the new standard.

Notion’s user interface (UI) patterns are becoming the new standard for software.

Notion software