Notion x Adobe Designathon


Enhancing productivity tools to help university students facilitate more efficient collaboration and sharing of work.

TimelineDecember 2024 [<24 hours]

RoleProduct Designer

DisciplinesUser Research
UI/UX Design
Storytelling
Web Design
Prototyping


Notion was built to break away from the scattered and inflexible tools of today.
Instead of siloing your work in separate apps, Notion blends your entire workflow into a single, all-in-one workspace. At its core, Notion is like a set of digital LEGOs; it provides the building blocks, from task lists to design repositories, that allow you to create your own customized tools. The goal is to empower you to solve problems your way, bounded only by your imagination.


*GIF sourced from Notion


With that spirit of empowerment in mind, we turn our focus to university students, a community that thrives on collaboration. 
While Notion helps solve the overwhelming problem of juggling work across different platforms, a new challenge can emerge within Notion itself. When an entire team works on a single page, a space intended for clarity can quickly become disorganized with clashing edits and buried information.

The challenge, therefore, isn't just about bringing work into one place; it's about making that one place function seamlessly for a group. This brings us to our central challenge:




How might we enhance Notion’s tools, interfaces, or presence to help university students facilitate more efficient collaboration and sharing of their academic and extracurricular work?


Here’s what we made:






Activity Log
A real-time, interactive feed that provides visibility into who is actively collaborating on a file and what they are working on.

It aims to foster collaboration, increase transparency, and keep everyone in the loop with minimal effort. This feature is especially useful for teams working in a shared workspace where multiple contributors are involved.










But how did we get here?


SELECTED RESEARCH METHODS


EXTRACTED INSIGHTS















What Notion users have to say...











Emerging Patterns 
& Themes