Notion’s New Customize Layouts Feature: A Quick Look
Notion’s recent Make with Notion event saw the launch of a number of exciting new features and the promise of more in the pipeline. One of the most interesting new features for me was their new layout builder. At a glance, it may just seem like a nice touch to organize properties and generally tidy up our view inside database pages but these feature offers huge potential to improve workflows and change how we interact with data in Notion.
How it Works
To access this feature click the ellipses icon on any database page and select Customize Layout, or mouseover the title on any database page to find the “Customize Layout” option.
You’ll see the familiar Heading section on the left hand side (Main page area), but you’ll now see an option to add a Panel on the right side (Details panel). You can manage how your database properties display between these 2 new areas. You can pin properties, organize them into sections and add dedicated panels to display properties (like the show as page section option we’ve had previously). If you want to learn more about how it works Notion have some great documentation on working with the layout editor; Build the perfect workflow with customizable layouts
Advantages
The strength of this feature is the new panel available on the right hand side. Being able to place your properties here in a “sticky” panel, means they’re always accessible now matter how far down the page you scroll. No more scrolling up blocks of text to view or edit a page property. The panel is also collapsible, which is another big plus. If you want your full screen real estate for your page content just hit the Details icon next to the Share button in the top corner, to toggle the panel open or closed. For those who prefer keyboard shortcuts you can use Control Shift \ works too. This feature also offers much better options for organizing your properties. Being able to organise properties into different collapsable sections in the Property Group panel just makes the database page much cleaner.
Disadvantages
Overall this is a huge win for Notion users. The only potential drawback I can see is that the fact there is now so many more ways to layout database properties it could become more cumbersome to find the property you’re looking for. Once your logical and consistent about your layout that shouldn’t be a huge issue.
Implementing in my My Notion Workspace
Personally, I’m primarily using the new Details panel. Adding some text heavy properties like AI summaries into their own panel at the top of the page might be useful but for the most part I’ve been content to keep them organized in sections in the Details panel. How your organize your details panel would very much depend on your needs and how on how many properties you’re working with but I’ve used this approach across a couple of my bigger databases and it’s working well so far.
Actions: This is where to add any button properties. Particularly those you would likely use when on the database page
Admin: All select, multi-select general data properties are placed here
Internal Relations: Any self-relation database properties are placed here in alphabetical order e.g. for Tasks, Blocking and Blocked By properties
Relations: Any relation properties to other databases are placed here in alphabetical order
System: Any system type properties.
For all my databases I have at least Last Edited By, Last Edited Time, Created By, Created Time, Page ID (formula to show Notion Page ID) in this section. For databases with a lot of properties their might be additional sections added as needed.
Example Use Case
This feature has led me to implement buttons more across my databases and placing them in an Actions section within the Details panel. For example having some quick add buttons in my Library Details panel, let’s me quickly add a note, or save a snippet from an article, into my Notes database and automatically have that note related back to the article in my library. When I’ve finished an article, I have another button that changes its status to Archived and maps some of the relevant data from the article to any related notes I’ve saved. I go into these workflows much more in my Note Taking Philosophy.
At launch I have noticed and issue with adding database buttons from the Details panel when a database button did not already exist in the database. The property did not appear in the available list. If you come across something similar you can still add a button from any database view and then come back to the Layout builder to place it in the appropriate section
Improvements
While overall this is a great addition to Notion, there’s definitely some features I would like to see improved.
Backlinks
We now only seem to be able to display backlinks in a minimal style, whereas we used to be display them as a more expanded list at the top of the page. I would like better visibility options for backlinks within the page layout. This also feeds in to my big requests for backlinks in general, which is the ability to have them display as a database property. Notion is a tool built primarily on databases. The purpose of databases is to be able to view the information you need at a database level, this is the whole philosophy my My Notion Workspace methodology. Backlinks are an excellent way to create relationships between pages without breaking your flow of writing. Quickly mention an article you read, a tool you are reviewing with an @ and you can create that relationship between where you’re writing and that page. However, it’s not possible to view that relationship at a database level. You need to drill down to the page level to be able to find where it’s linked. Having a dedicated property for mentions, or even better mapping that to relation properties would be a game changer. It would dramatically improve my Note Taking Process and avoid having to use the complex automation I currently have. There’s more on that here if you’re interested. Automating Notion Relations with Make.com
Add Multiple Properties to a Panel
Having the option to have multiple property groups would be a nice addition. Adding an additional panel allows you to dedicate a chunk of screen real estate for a specific property. I’m using this primarily for AI summary property and it’s been great. However, I have a couple of other text heavy properties that just appear cluttered in the Details panel but I don’t necessarily always want to have expanded at the top of my page, pushing the actual page content below the fold.
For example, in my Knowledge Management Kit I have a Library database with AI properties that suggest content ideas based on the article I saved, and pulls a list of all the links in the article to suggest them for further reading. Really helpful properties, but they don’t suit the narrow Details panel and I don’t always want to see them at the top of my page. If these were in a section at the top of my page, I could open and close that toggle as I needed.
Another approach or even in addition to this would be having that whole top panel become sticky and collapsible like the Details panel. This would be a better way to show text heavy properties, while having the same flexibility of the Details panel.
Customize the layout based on a page template
It would be great to have the option to create different layouts based on the database template used. For example I use my Notes database to take notes on absolutely everything from coding projects, to worldbuilding and fiction writing and writing articles like these. I distinguish the types of notes with different properties and database templates. Being able to pin more relevant properties within each template would be a nice touch.
Availability for Wiki Pages
It doesn’t appear that the Layout Builder is available for Wiki pages yet. This would be a great addition.
Place Properties on a Page
This one feels like more of a longshot, but the option to place properties within the page content is something I would be really interested in seeing. Having this in place could create some interesting workflows, where you fill in the relevant properties as you progress through the page content, making the process feel a little more natural. There’s some clever albeit involved solutions to achieve a similar result (Matthias Frank does a great walkthrough of one here; How To Show Notion Properties inside a Notion Page) but having the built in functionality would unlock some great workflow options. Other tools in this space, like Coda have a similar solution, at least for their equivalent of formulas. So hopefully this is something that the Notion team have in the pipeline.
The data in a Notion page can sometimes feel disconnected from the data at the database level. A clever UI change like this goes a long way to making that data feel more unified. With hope for some further improvements down the road we’ll hopefully see some more interesting ways to work with data within database pages.