Explain the problem as you see it
Tana feels oddly "loose" and inexpensive.
In today's age, the aesthetic aspect and user viewing experience are crucial factors that determine the survival of a new contender in the market. Just look at the statistics showing how poorly designed apps struggle despite having impressive features – many have either disappeared entirely or are barely staying afloat.
The design aspect will hinder this app from reaching its potential
Everything seems overly intrusive, particularly when it comes to writing and viewing within the outline editor. I won't even touch on the aesthetic appeal of the table, card, calendar view, and other panels. Essentially, everything looks and feels cheap and a bit too "Times New Roman" & Windowy 97. There's also the practicality side as well; the difficulty inputting fields in a database view is a nightmare. There's too many to list.
Why is this a problem for you?
If I'm the only one feeling this way please disregard..
Suggest a solution
You have a gem here but aim to refine the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), making the application more snappy, visually appealing, intuitive, and less cluttered. IMHO if you don't take a series of design and functionality modifications you will be in trouble. You have Notion and Capacities as your go to examples.
Sincerely,
As a matter of personal opinion
5 Comments
Interesting opinions! Personally I love the aesthetic of Tana, it's up there as one of the biggest things that has kept me using it over the past couple of years.
I don’t have access and haven’t been using Tana, so my comments are based on what I see in the videos.
The UI looks a lot like Notion to me. I don’t hate it, but I have a lot of problems with parts of the UI and some of the overall UX in Notion. (However, I’ll keep discussion focused on aethetics.)
The tight spacing of the notes in the dashboard are contributing to its clunky, developer-designed look. Some people will enjoy everything tightly packed to save space because that works for their brains.
But others like me prefer more breathing space (minimum 1.2 line spacing and minimum .8 line height between items). Otherwise, our brains look at that wall of text and just want to shut down the app and not look at it again. For example, having list items compacted into a single paragraph text is horrible for me (looking at the video on https://tana.inc/pkm).
On a desktop or iPad, I would prefer things to be more scannable rather than space saving. Maybe on a phone, the space saving would be better, but then, I would never look at something like this on my phone—it would irritate me too much to have too small a view.
(On the other hand, a mindmap view, despite the mess of linking lines would be far preferable to me. But this is another thread.)
Will there be options to change the fonts? The spacing?
My gut feeling is the other thing that makes it look “cheap” is the use of emoji icons. For a certain demographic, these are normal and not a problem. As a designer, though, I find it looks juvenile and lacks cohesion. The emojis don’t all have the same modelling, design style, and the colour palette is “everything” which means they all stand out without any one being able to stand out. I would prefer custom icons that match and cohere together, the ability to upload my own, or the ability to disable them altogether (because I don’t have access to the app yet, I can’t verify if these are already options).
Notion uses the same idea and when I see templates that use emojis, I don’t think of Notion as a serious tool for serioius users. I think of it as something students and hobbyists use to make simple databases. Now, Notion does have it’s own set of custom icons that cohere, so you don’t have to use emojis—plus you can upload your own.
I would have to use Tana before I could say more about aesthetics and my experience looking at it, though.
Just an heads up, the emojis you see is opted in by the user. The default design does not have any emojis to have the need to disable them. Either way, you can actually upload custom icons and have a more clean feel. You can check out this link: https://x.com/dreetje/status/1794254964187169203
Good to know. So, it’s much like Notion. It’s only a pain in Notion if you use templates other people have set up and they’ve used these emojis everywhere. But going in and changing them all is the price you pay for using someone else’s template, I suppose.
If you are interested to test it out and still don't have an invite, l can send you one.