A big theme of the “Year of the Maker” webinar was making Coda more familiar to a wider group of potential makers and users. I wanted to suggest some behavior with the “create row with button” that I think would help with this.
Creating a data record in a task or project management system - an “issue,” or “task,” or “project” is a common activity that is similar in most apps that users coming to Coda may be familiar with. With the “create with button” capability, and the details view that results from this, Coda has already got a big degree of familiarity set up for these users.
I wanted to suggest some more ways the whole process of “creating a row with a button” could be adapted to bring in some additional flexibility:
- When a row is created with a button, always surface the “floating box” modal that pops up from time to time in Coda in other circumstances. It would also be great if the modal itself offered some functionality:
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provide a link to the row, so the row can be accessed right away. At times I lose track of where the row went, for example if I’m in a view of a table where the button also is located, so I can’t necessarily see the row once I create it.
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provide link to copy the row’s hyperlink straight to the clipboard. This would allow the row to be referenced immediately with a quick “paste” action. Say you are in a table where you click a button to create the row. And you want to reference the new row in the table from which you click the button. This way you can “grab” the row’s reference very quickly, and paste right back in where you were working. I’ve used this in other apps, and it really speeds activity around the app.
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Undo row creation. Straightforward enough, if for some reason the user doesn’t want that row, allow instant deletion. This saves the step of going to find it, and then deleting. Real timesaver.
- Along the lines of the “undo row creation” I just suggested on the proposed pop-up modal, have the option, when using a button, to configure that the row only “creates” upon closing out the row. Or, have a button such as “create row” that would surface on the details view when the row is created with this button. This is very common in a lot of other apps, where you click “+” or “Create task,” pop up a modal with this record, fill it in, and then hit another button which is the action of actually saving it to the app’s system, or cancelling and not creating it. I think this would help a lot of Coda users who are not used to clicking a button, and having the record - the Coda Row in this case - already be in the system live right away.
Thanks Guys!