Facilitating Context Awareness for Professional Teams
Evolving the existing Notion and Slack integration by designing an intuitive, AI assisted documentation workflow.
Time Frame
3 weeks
Purpose
Personal Project
Software
Figma, Claude, Vercel
Role
UX Design
The Problem
Professional Teams Often Forget Important Decisions.
Important decisions and context are frequently lost or buried across verbal conversations and various messaging platforms. When collaborators can't easily retrieve the reasoning or outcomes of past discussions, they are forced to re-consider decisions, make assumptions, and act without full context.
The Solution
Designed a Simple, Intuitive Documentation System Powered by AI.
I evolved the existing Notion and Slack integration to allow coworkers to intuitively retrieve previous context of decisions. My proposed design uses AI to surface discussion points from Slack and organize them inside Notion.
Solution part 1: A simplified Notion database that organizes key discussion points from Slack into an interactive timeline dashboard.
Solution part 2: Slack AI bundles key discussion points from threads and holds them for approval before pushing to your Notion dashboard.
The Results
Results from Professional PM Software Users
Intuitiveness rated 5/5 for searching for a previous note.
Testers enjoyed the interactivity of the Notion dashboard.
The Slack-side approval process made them feel in control of the system.
The Business Goal
Notion & Slack Combo Becomes Indespensible, Increasing Daily Active Usage
$7B
Global Revenue of Project mgmt software. Source: Monday.com (2025)
~70%
Fortune 500 companies use Notion for team collaboration. Source: Fueler (2026)
20 Million
Active Notion users per month. Source: Fueler (2026)
Competitive Landscape
I compared 3 other leading project management and collaboration tools to understand how they support team communication, knowledge organization, and project execution. Each score is an average rating based on product capabilities from 2025.
Tool
Notion
Asana
Monday.com
Trello
Interviews & Secondary Research
"Decisions are scattered and rarely get documented"
I interviewed 5 PM software users and found a pattern of issues around context awareness in professional workplaces. 4/5 interviewees mentioned they often have trouble retrieving context from past decisions. This either makes it difficult to feel confident when revisiting discussions, or forces their team to reconsider decisions all-together.
Reddit Posts about Context Awareness Issues
"What's interesting is most people already have Jira/Asana/etc., but the failure point seems to happen before things even make it into those systems."
"The issue seems to be the gap between conversation and commitment"
"We'll often get replies to emails we send to our overseas manufacturers but they don't always end up in the same email thread, which makes it difficult to search for past conversations and keep everything together."
Defining the Problem
Understanding why People Don't Document Things.
Often times, there's not one place or one source of truth where discussions and decisions live within a team organization, making it difficult to search for them.
If there is a place where decisions get documented, team members rely on each others' forethought to know what's worth capturing and when, especially because many decisions are made over time from conversation.
How Might We..
Re-surface discussions made across tools, so collaborators can retrieve context and act with confidence?
Persona
Target Persona: Linda, 27, The Team Collaborator.
Journey Map
Identifying Pain Points in the Persona's Current Workflow.
Analyzing Notion's Existing UI & Interactions
Analyzing Notion's existing views, I identified several areas for improvement to increase at-a-glance readability, reduce complexity, and improve the user interaction.
Notion's Timeline View
Many blank dates; new items default to 5 days. Clicking “New” hides items until dated. Only one item per line, and stacking risks clutter and excessive UI height.
Notion's Table View
Notion’s table view shows many items at once, but details require clicking in. Search is intuitive, though the icon isn’t obvious, and the view lacks visual clarity.
Notion's Kanban View
Notion’s kanban view shows more detail at a glance, but limited columns mean excessive scrolling to navigate across months or years.
Notion's Calendar View
Notion’s calendar view is closest to ideal, but limited to one month at a time and shows only properties, not actual content previews.
Interaction Design Inspiration
Taking inspiration from Apple Photos and Google Calendar
I took inspiration from the Apple photos and Google calendar UI for their intuitive format of timeline-based data organization. The users of this new Notion and Slack feature must be able to quickly digest information about dates and note details.
Gallery-timeline view
Category Organization
Timeline List
User Interaction Ideas
How can we draw from Notion's existing database views to improve at-a-glance readability and reduce complexity?
User Interaction Ideas
How can we allow the user to intuitively create, approve & deny notes on the Slack side?
User Testing of the New Notion Dashboard
"I love the interactivity and it's very intuitive to find and search for a note."
Said the User Testers
User Testing of the New Notion Dashboard
"Everything makes sense, and I like how you can add files here."
Said the User Testers
User Testing of the New Slack Page
"It's nice that you can edit the notes in Slack first. Easy to Use."
Said the User Testers
