Improved the visibility, usability, and accessibility of Notion’s notification system. We placed 2nd in a Notion x Adobe Designation welcoming 18+ teams of product designers.
Overview
In December 2024, I partcipated in the Notion × Adobe Designathon, completing a full human-centred design process and presenting our final concept to Adobe and Notion product managers within five hours.
Notion is a productivity platform that helps students stay organised with integrated note-taking, project workspaces, calendars, and AI writing tools. See my two workspaces above.
Personal workspace
Business workspace
Diving into research, our team found that users found separated workspace updates, unclear text and inconsistent landing pages hindered collaboration. We gained these insights from web-scraped Quora, Reddit and Facebook posts.
From our analysis, we discovered we could sort user's pain points into three categories. As we weighed ideas with an impact-effort matrix, we sought to ensure our solution accurately addressed these needs.
🤝
Accessibility
👀
Visibility
From our analysis and ideation, we identified three key improvements to Notion’s notification system aligned with the themes we discovered. The final product was informed by group discussions that considered Notion’s existing features and competitor notification systems.
🤝
Accessibility
NEW: Homepage opens first with clear, outlined notification bar.
👀
Visibility
Notifications appear together in the inbox, and tags identify the edited workspace.
🛠️
Usability
Sleek, separated updates with rankings and calendar integrations.
Massive thank you to Anh, Hailie and Aaron for their collaboration! Together, we made careful decisions under time pressure, gleaned valuable research insights, and won 2nd place overall. We also received valuable feedback from product designers and managers. Overall, this was an amazing experience. Great job, team!
🏆
Adobe Product Designer
"Notification UX pain was clearly articulated and mapped. Overall, great exploration of a topic no other team looked into."
🏅
Notion Product Designer
"Very compelling focus on accessibility, usability and visibility with a solution that effectively address your HMW. Great work."
🏵️
Adobe Project Manager
"You honed in on one particular product experience — difficult within Notion. Your focus was very advantageous!"