notebooks for designers
Notebooks bridged the gap between discussion and execution that often plagues digital design workflows fragmented across multiple platforms such as Jira, Trello, Notion, and Slack.
By enabling designers, product managers, and engineers to centralize research, stakeholder feedback, and design reviews, it became essential for maintaining context, tracking decisions, and accelerating delivery cycles. Notebooks was acquired by Adobe in 2022.
Timeline
May 2021 – January 2022
Employer
Abstract, Remote
DESIGNING FOR DESIGNERS
So you're a designer. Perhaps a digital designer of systems, products, brands, marketing materials – maybe all of the above. How many applications do you use for your day-to-day work? Still counting? At Abstract, we used two: Notebooks and Figma (and sometimes FigJam 😉). At a remote-first company of about 80 individuals, we set out to revolutionize the ways of product design. The pain points were clear: there was no concise yet comprehensive way to do agile design work without using dozens of tools and maybe dozens more just for documentation.
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What was the decision out of that last design review? Did anyone write it down? What was the research behind that? Were stakeholders in agreement? What do you mean he wasn't on the call? What were the requirements again? Did you record the meeting? Is there a transcript to skim? Where are the designs? That link is broken. What happened to the concepts from that workshop in 2019? What's the context behind that? Did you talk to engineering?
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Over the course of 17 months, Notebooks was designed and built with these infamous questions in mind. Yes, there's Jira, Confluence, Trello, Slack, Notion, and ... email – but they all have a wall where talking about screens ends and making screens begins.
Notebooks was created to be a door.
replacing dropbox paper with our very own notebooks
In a matter of months, we made Notebooks our home for anything worth remembering. Workshoppers detailed their design thinking thoughts here, product managers crafted their PRDs here, designers performed stakeholder reviews here, and engineers started their context-gathering here.
On a small design team of six and engineering team of four, we created these beloved top features:
Notebook statuses such as, "Draft" and "Open for Feedback" to easily track a project's progress
Smart Jira link unfurls to also track real-time ticket statuses, from within the notebook
A robust Figma + FigJam plugin allowing any Fig user to curate and push frames directly to their notebook
Comment threads attached to a specific design frame or text node, with emoji reactions 💅🏽
Notebook reviews: the ability to approve, request changes, and/or comment on a curated prompt
Tracked decisions that rolled up to the top of the notebook after one or more reviews
A Slackbot to nudge requested parties when a colleague has asked for their review
Design versioning to traverse the history and conversations behind Figma frames in a notebook
Focus mode: allowing a notebook to be presented in a fullscreen deck format
REQUESTING REVIEWS ON WORK, IN CONTEXT OF, YA KNOw, THE WORK
COLLABORATING TOWARDS A DECISION, WITH VOTES FROM TEAMMATES
After 17 months of magic, Notebooks caught the eye of the company behind fan favorites, Photoshop and Illustrator. In January of 2022, Notebooks was acquired to be integrated with Adobe's Creative Cloud suite of services.