Notion has a beautiful aesthetic and powerful feature set that makes building creative and complex pages really attractive.

It's a very recent modern marvel that you don't have to be sitting at your desk to access these pages, you can carry them around in your pocket. Notion does an exceptional job of making so many of it's features available through the mobile app but there are a few tricks to creating pages that work smoothly and look great.

Most blocks display just as naturally on pages on both desktop and mobile and give you heaps of options for creating stunning looking pages. There are however a few tips to making these mobile pages really shine.

Blocks of text wrap heavily on mobile. You're lucky to get more than 10 words to a line. So what appears to be a short paragraph on the desktop can appear like an essay in the mobile view. Not a major issue but certainly worth consider if you're building a page you want people to engage with.

Almost all the embed options work remarkably well on mobile. They look great and the relevant ones such as Maps and Miro are even interactive. One caveat though is PDFs, if you embed a PDF you will see the embed on desktop but on mobile you will see a link to the file instead. If you want to see your documents inline on mobile I'd suggest embedding them from Google Drive which displays as you would expect.

Breadcrumbs are a really useful feature to help navigate your Notion workspace. Sadly on mobile they easily lose some of their utility.

The breadcrumb to this particular page in my workspace looks like this on desktop.

And if the breadcrumb is too long to be fully displayed I can click the ... and I'll be shown the missing page titles.

On mobile however the breadcrumb displays like this.

Not so pretty and if you happen to click any of the truncated titles that you can't quite see in the hope that you'll be shown the title of the page, you will instead jump straight to that page.

If used well columns can help create function and style in a page that you want to work across both desktop and mobile. I used them a lot in my personal dashboards. They allow me to display lots of data in balanced and easy to navigate views on my big screens and if I've built the pages correctly the same data flows nicely on mobile.

The trick here is to make sure that the columns start and stop at the right points. On desktop columns are obviously displayed next to one another across the page. On mobile those columns are displayed one after the other as you scroll down the page. The secret to making sure your page presents as you intend on mobile is to ensure that you break the columns where you would like the mobile view to start displaying the next column.

Let's use this layout as an example. We've want to use 3 columns across the page and we have 9 sections of information to display

We can fix this pretty easily though. We just need to insert a break between the columns as they run down the page.

Tables are a wonderful tool for seeing heaps of data at once, you get lots of information in context and on a big screen that's fantastic. Perhaps not the prettiest view but super useful. Sadly this doesn't make the jump to mobile very well at all. Side scrolling is never that great and on mobile it's even more challenging. You lose the key benefit of a table, you can't see much at once and having properties scroll off the screen means you lose the context too. Unless you have very few properties in your database I would avoid tables for any pages you want to access on mobile.

Kanban style boards are hugely popular and can provide a sense of the workflow just by viewing them. They give the user the opportunity to move things forward in a tactile way which many find rewarding. Sadly side scrolling rears it's ugly head again and breaks a bunch of this flow. The mechanics of touching and holding to move items on mobile is a poor experience compared to the accuracy and ease of point and click with a mouse or trackpad.

I was surprised to find the calendar a pretty decent option on mobile. The functionality isn't quite the same as on desktop in that you have click on a date to see the relevant entries but there is no scrolling and it's possible to see which days have entries at a glance.

Being the most minimalist option available, a list is always going to work on mobile. Unless of course you try and show too many properties, though that doesn't really work very well on the desktop view either. One sore point for me is that the titles can't be wrapped so if you have a long title you'll only be able to see the first 6 or 7 words of it.

We've saved the best for last. The Gallery view absolutely shines on mobile. Whether you've set the cards to be small, medium or large makes no difference, they just fill the width of the screen and stack themselves on top of each other.

As you can see there are a few pitfalls when creating pages that you want to view across both desktop and mobile, however with a little insight and adjustment you can create great pages for both access points.

Below are gifs of my dashboard in action.

📺 View the video walkthrough of this article

Feel free to contact me via 📧 email or on 🐦 twitter.

❤️ Many thanks to Lennon Cheng for design support and encouragement.