Michael Zhu
Personal use path
- brand design is very consistent and plays into the casual artsy vibes
- i like how they ask for your use case
- i also like how short their onboarding is
- this is literally it — no series of pages you need to rage click ‘continue’ to get thru
- i personally feel like there is no good reason to add extra pages in an onboarding flow unless there is something that is absolutely critical to getting a user set up
- they bring you into the product immediately after this and provide you some starter template apps that cater to the use case that you selected

- users can either start exploring the product or spend a few seconds reading the basics
- either way they spend more time in the product and learning about it which is good
- any bug or annoyance that causes them to leave the product entirely is an absolute MUST FIX
- i like how notion also uses the product itself to showcase it’s features
- as a user digs deeper into the templates they discover more features

- the placeholder text is also super powerful guide for users in a document style application like notion
Team use path

- if you pick team use, they ask a few more questions about your role, the company, and your use cases

- classic CTA to invite teammates
- i wonder what the success rates of these pages are? are they worth the extra friction?

- they present templates that are ultra focused based on the role and use cases that you previously selected
- the hover transition is a bit laggy, i wonder why they didn’t just use images, maybe it was just easier on the eng side to maintain consistency?
- i appreciate that the templates are so targeted and it honestly does represent use cases that i would be familiar with
- i also like how the concept of teamspaces is precreated for the team use case and doesn’t show up when i said i wanted to use notion for personal usage
- it was a bit confusing to understand at first what the point of a “teamspace” is but i quickly got around to it when i played around with permissions and inviting users

- when u get deeper into the templates there are more delightful moments like a how-to-use guide built into the pre-made template

- nice integrated checkout interface