Hello again!
As I got a few responses to this post, I thought I’d provide an update. I am currently in yet another iteration of trying to adopt Coda to my team! 2.0 solved a lot of the issues I cited above, so that’s great. I am still struggling with some of the UI stuff, as my team is not used to seeing our work items in a raw table, but Coda’s UI has really stepped it up this year and this is not something that is preventing our adoption.
My current list of items that are probably the biggest roadblocks are:
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Inability to link easily to multiple tables. Tools such as Jira and Aha let you link issues to each other across the whole app. With Coda, as powerful as lookups are, you are only able to use this to link two tables, so that limits flexibility. Also, the need to manually set up a reciprocal relationship has been a burden, as we are setting up a ton of stuff in just one doc. As a side, Notion automatically links tables once one lookup column is established - would love to see that with Coda.
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More “user friendly” views - some examples of what I mean here:
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I think the expanded card view could have some options like “full screen,” or “reduced” where it would shrink to part size and pin to the right side of the screen - a frequent behavior in apps like the aforementioned Jira, Asana, etc.
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Also, I think there could be a bunch more customizations in the card view, which is still pretty raw IMHO. It would only be a question of a basic redesign to bring it into shape to look like all the best ones out there.
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User story board/swimlanes in card view: I posted about that here: New Features for cards. You guys already have the ability to group by the top or left, so this seems like an easy addition to allow grouping by some other column in the table.
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Hierarchical view in table view. A lot of talk about this on the community, it would really help us out to be able to see subtasks, or any sub items, when the basic table view is presented. Here’s some of the talk about this:
I think the Coda team has this last one on its radar, really hope so and eager to see it in production!
- Some kind of search results. My team is really used to looking for items with search, as we frequently can’t remember exactly what something was named, etc. Stuff like showing recent searches when clicking in the search box, and other basic functionality would be great to see soon.
I hope this update is useful. I know Coda’s stated mission is to be a Doc that’s an App, and to provide the best possible canvas for Makers to build creatively. But I for one believe that Coda is in the lead in the market to solve a huge problem - a Single Source of Truth app for company management, in particular start-ups and Tech-focused. So I am holding out for features that will continue to get you guys to this second goal. No reason you can’t be both of these things!