Overview

It is a little difficult to define and explain what Notion is to someone new, as its block system allows it to be a kanban board, a knowledge management service or, a simple note-taking software. Fun fact, I have been using notion for all of the above for the past 2 years, and I love it. When the Notion API was announced, I was excited to see what integrations people will build and what I could build.

Of course with all products which offer integrations and plugins, comes a marketplace for discovery like VSCode marketplace and Figma community. This is how I would go about designing a marketplace for Notion.

User journey - Understanding our users

Users

Requirement or need for a plugin or a template usually arises while working on a notion page and realising something is missing. The typical user journey flow would be as follows.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/5aa614ff-d4fd-46a4-adee-f05cc06efb93/User_Journey.svg

Users would generally use the marketplace for two things.

  1. They would maybe come to the marketplace because of a specific problem they faced while working on Notion, and want to find a template or plugin to ease their work.
  2. Gradually as the Notion Marketplace community grows, browsing behaviour will start becoming more common, where users will start exploring the marketplace without a specific requirement in mind. This is similar to window shopping. This would be another use case.

Makers

We are not only designing the marketplace for users of the plugins, but also the developers and makers. Their requirements are quite different. The typical user journey for a maker would be as follows.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/1741e48e-bc47-41e9-a3e2-9ca3c1bae337/Maker_Journey.svg

<aside> 💡 It is important to note that many notion community members sell paid templates, and it is an important aspect of the Notion ecosystem. Various notion community members on Reddit and Twitter share their templates for free or make them available for a nominal fee. Some developers would likely like to monetise all the efforts they put into developing a plugin, and we should provide affordances for them to do so.

</aside>

Key takeaways from our user journeys

  1. Makers love feedback, and there should be an easy way for users to provide it to them.
  2. Monetisation is important for notion makers, and we should provide ways for them to manage sales and revenue.
  3. Users want to search and compare different plugins and templates to find the one that best fits their requirements.
  4. Explorative user needs and search-based user needs, both should be addressed.