"Followed by the team saying "why are newbies struggling to onboard""
Yes I would not mind learning the ins and outs of the complexity and there are many great YouTubers like Ev who make brilliant content. But what's slowly pushing me away from tana is not setting up the structure but the "death by a thousand paper cuts" the user interface has.
There are so so many little frustrating things that make it just a chore to use normally.
I want to organize a brainstorming session into a nice hierarchy. No problem in workflowy or todoist. I can just use the mouse to nest nodes under each other. Tana, for some reason, wants you to open the node, drag it underneath, and then close it back up.
Why can I use "move with finder" but not a normal drag and drop?
I have pinned notes which are great! I can have my most accessed projects at my finger tips. Sweet and if I pin it they work as a capture target on mobile.
But why can't I be in my day node and drag/drop captured ideas over to the pinned node and have it work as a drop target. No I can only pin it by dragging over.
I was so confused by this that I had filed it as a bug twice by accident.
Moving your content around and organizing it is such a chore that I'm ready to drop tana for something else... And it SUCKS because the idea behind it is brilliant and exactly what I had always wanted. The weird UX design decisions is ultimately what stops tana from adopting, not the super tags.
Another small thing that gets me is Ctrl shift up and down moves a node up and down in the hierarchy. Other outliners let you use left and right to indent and indent, feels intuitive like navigating around. But in Tana you have to use tab and shift tab.
I've no idea if the Tana team are this deep in the comments - my guess is not. Could you post this to some general discussion thread in Slack and get some visibility on it? You are spot on! Their path to a billion dollar valuation lies not in yet more complexity, but in "simple" usability improvements.
Here's my concern. I spent over a decade in Workflowy. I finally gave up as I had all these ridiculous workarounds to get data into the system. Fortunately they had this keen talented user base who knitted these kludgy solutions. But none of it was really maintained. That and the batshit insane pronouncements from their chief "I'm bored of working on the core product, so I'm going to go off and invent new shit - good luck everyone". I mean it was outrageous - and fortunately the core developer team rebelled and went full skunk works to keep rolling out core products. But without some kind of vision at the top, it was ad-hoc. They had a "new product ideas" on their slack that really should have been named "screaming into the void" - it was a model of dysfunction that can only work because they are beholden to no one. Their freedom lead to a lack of discipline (like why do I have to fire up a full external solution Wfx to simply sort nodes alphabetically?).
So anyway, I moved my whole outline to Tana with the idea that the team is actually actively developing, is transparent, seems to give a shit about its users, also has a keen set of users. I could move it because WF is text, so ultimately while some of the hot link mirrors etc would break, it would all be there.
So now I'm on Tana. And my concern is they DO have funding, so now they DO have to bring on users and make a business of it. I'm not a programmer, but I'm not a complete slob - I'm an EE, I've an MBA from a fancy school, I founded and ran a small but profitable company. And this thing is often baffling. Death by a thousand papercuts is a perfect encapsulation. I've bought a bunch of coaching from Ev who was wonderful. But everything is a slog. Because they are actually developing stuff I'm hopeful it will get fixed. But will it? I see users pulling them into more and more complexity, whereas things like "drag and drop so you can make hierarchy a joy" just not even close to happening.
So if they can't simplify, they can't get users and keep engagement up. Then they will have to exit or close down. And I've got a decade of stuff in there. But worse - because the Tana datacube is so complicated, I'm not sure I could get that data out (yeah, they built an export file - but is that really going to work - like how would I get that back into WFlowy - I don't think I could). So now I'm stuck on this ship - which I really really REALLY need to work - but I'm not sure they are going the right way, and I don't know how to help. It makes me really anxious.
I wish the team would spend two weeks on TickTick to see what simple outlining and timing integration can do.
I wish the team would spend a month on WFlowy so they can see the power of creating links and mirrors on the fly.
I wish the team would prioritize mobile so that the mobile experience at least even mirrors the desktop e.g. when I use "add a new item to an option list" - that items shows on desktop but not on mobile?!?
One definition of stress is "to not have any influence on an outcome that is important to you". I'm super stressed when I think of Tana I'm not sure what to do about that.