Case study: Journaling feature for Notion
By: Kulikova Anna
Tags: Journaling, Desing Thinking, Notion, Case Study, UX Design

Explore your creativity

Source — Notion.so

When applying for a UX/UI position you can be asked to design a feature for this company. Your feature with a grand probability won’t have a direct connection with what the company is doing, to avoid you feeling like you did some unpaid work. Those exercises are made to test your skills and overall understanding of the product o service. You can always take your favourite app and try to do it by yourself!

My challenge was to create private journaling for Notion.

🟡 My challenge was to create a private journaling feature for Notion.

What is journaling?

Journaling is simply putting on paper your thoughts and feelings to understand them more clearly. The benefits of journaling are widely known, it can help you improve your mental health, cope with stress and anxiety and understand yourself better.

What are the associations users have about journaling? Mine told me these keywords: personal diary, share feelings, intimacy, private life.

Competitive Analysis

There are already quite a few journaling apps on market. They generally have common basic features like adding a note, receiving notification for a daily entry, audio entries, adding an image to your note, emotional evaluation etc.

Competitive Analysis

❗️Nevertheless, some of them have important issues, such as :

Dont’s of journalind apps

User research

With all this information a headed to user interviews. I have conducted four interviews. Here is my user profile 💁‍♀️: 1) confident Notion user; 2) digital native with average age 25–29 years; 3) three woman and one man 4) they all have a creative professional occupation (urbanist, designer, composer, web developer); 5) they need to be autonomous in their organization.

Here is what I learned from them :

First of all no intimate information on Notion ! Why? Because people are mostly using Notion for organizing their work, they are frequently sharing some of their notes and pages with other collaborators. For this reason, all of my users were opposed to keeping a personal diary on Notion

! Why? Because people are mostly using Notion for organizing their work, they are frequently sharing some of their notes and pages with other collaborators. For this reason, all of my users were opposed to keeping a personal diary on Notion Fear of white page. The common pain point for all four users was a fear of a white page. It really not this obvious to start writing “something”. All users told me that they deal with this just fine, when they need to write something for the work, but do struggle greatly to write something for themselves. This struggle creates frustration and even a feeling of guilt and anxiety.

The common pain point for all four users was a fear of a white page. It really not this obvious to start writing “something”. All users told me that they deal with this just fine, when they need to write something for the work, but do struggle greatly to write something for themselves. This struggle creates frustration and even a feeling of guilt and anxiety. Guiding steps. While discussing the feeling of being lost in front of the white page. some of the users told that some kind of guidance would be helpful. Together we found an example of “Wreck this journal” as something that could be an inspiration for this.

“Once in front of a white page, I don't even know how to start” — Amanda

Organizing ideas. All users told me that one of the main points to keep notes for them is to memorize different moments of their life and to keep track of their creative ideas.

“Sometimes, I need to go through my notes to find an idea” — Guillaume

Notifications. Finally, the users told that finding the motivation to write is a big pain point. For them, the possibility to have some kind of notification could be helpful.

So with all this in mind let’s redefine “journaling” from being an intimate diary to a creative tool, that could help us to explore our creativity, and sustain our writing as a habit. Nevertheless, some of them have important issues, such as :

Redefining the “journal”.

User flow and new features

Basing on all the feedback from the research and following the initial brief with a redefined definition of “Journaling”, I came up with these new features:

Journaling home page that encourages to adapt writing as a creative habit. Here the user will give him/herself permission to “create junk”.

that encourages to adapt writing as a creative habit. Here the user will give him/herself permission to “create junk”. Guiding templates for creative writing: description of an image, haiku, textual game “ Colossal cave adventure”.

Widget/Notification with a funny proposition to write something every day.

Userflow

User tests and Iterations

To gain a better understanding of how users are interacting with Notion, I have conducted 5 user tests :

3 users of Notion (the interviewed users )

2 non-users of Notion

If the general idea of creating a template for the creative writing was warmly welcomed and adored by all the testers. However, some critical feedback led me to do some iterations, on 4 screens in total. The main issues were: information hierarchy, visibility and “ too much text”.

I. Template choice

On this screen, 4 out of 5 users had trouble navigating. They were clearly preferring the templates. The ordinary possibility to write something did not arouse any interest.

After the iteration: this screen has a more visual identity, but still can be personalized; the hierarchy of information is more clear; the free entry is highlighted so it has an equal impact as the templates.

II. Journal homepage

On the homepage screen, 2 users (non-users of Notion) were overwhelmed by the quantity of information. Also, 5 out of 5 users didn’t click on the “Notification” setting.

After the iteration: the notification setting is removed and potentially placed to the moment of installation of the application; the information is more clearly structured; the “hide description” is replaced by the toggle.

III. Hide information

5 out of 5 users didn’t see the option “hide description”. What is interesting here is that the design of this element follows the common design of the Notion. This means that generally, it could be a point for its users.

After the iteration, the “hide description” is replaced by the toggle, while a short welcome message gives the user an understanding of what type of information he/she will find.

IV. Widget

The main issue with the widget feature was the feeling of pressure and an absence of evidence of “emergency exit”.

After the iteration, a clear closing element was added to the widget.

Prototype

Here you can see the video of the hi-fi prototype, both for the entry directly from the application and from the widget.

What’s next?

What could be done next? Some of the users told that more visualisation of their progress could be very helpful and motivating. So a statistics page combined with a progression bar could be an interesting addition to this journaling feature. As much as adaptive notifications and some more templates for every day.

Thank you very much for reading me!

And yes, if somebody from Notion is reading this …

I’m open to collaboration! 😄😉✨