Someone needs to help simplify the login workflow on the Coda landing page! It’s…I’m sorry to say…terrible and frankly makes a bad impression on new users (especially technical ones). It makes a simple process of using your company email and password out to be the absolute least likely manner by which you would think to log in by trying to “streamline” and encourage the user to use email verification as the login method. Maybe I’m already behind the times and this is the latest way to try and push towards the future, but it’s really difficult to log in. Like really difficult.
Let me show you all, if you don’t know, just how many steps it takes to onboard a new user using your work email the traditional way:
You go to sign up, either through a link in an email or by going to coda.io
You click into “Work Email” thinking very little about it because Google and every other app you’ve ever interacted with usually starts like this
You enter your email
You click “Continue”
You get a prompt to check your email
You follow the prompt link back to the system
It says “Sorry, we could not log you in”
If you’re totally new, maybe you think you did something wrong and you try again
Same result
You contact IT or the maker editor and at least one of them knows what you’re talking about
Then they send you an SOP (only in existence because this happens to everyone this way) that outlines the 5 step process on signing up with your work email, which is:
It took almost 30 minutes of at least 2 people’s time and 15 steps and a lot of frustration to get someone signed in.
And this happens every…single…time. Unless the one person who knows is on the front end of the discussion; and even then, it takes 5 whole steps!
Please help us!! And thank you in advance for your consideration. I’m really trying to get more people to use this thing, but we need a little familiarity at the get go if people are going to dive in!
Hi Kolbi! Sarah here from our Product team. Thank you so much for sharing more about your experience getting new team members logged into Coda. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that you and your team are encountering, and it is certainly not the experience we want anyone to have when getting started with Coda. We plan to further discuss as a team how we can improve this flow.
Additionally, I’ll be reaching out directly to share some best practices for your situation. I would also be more than happy to chat live about how you can improve this for your team specifically, and discuss other feedback you may have for the team!
Yes! Getting my team of very smart people signed up correctly (and then making it possible for them to log in without this long process every time) was bizarrely complicated.
It often feels like coda is set up to do very complex things but it also turns very basic things into unnecessarily complex tasks
100x yes!
I have exactly the same opinion of the login process.
Why on earth is the smallest text link on the page the one to initiate a normal password based login, and why on earth is there a second page to try to trap you into still not using a username/password???
If even broke the workflow for one customer, who accidentally logged in via a Google account instead of using their Coda username/password, and Coda then changed their profile first and last name to match their Google account name!!! This effectively meant they were showing as logged in as a different person to what we wanted.
I had to recreate their account from scratch to fix this, as Coda insisted from that point onward that the Google account profile was the authoritative truth for the Coda user also!
It was all caused by the convoluted and hidden login path that has been created.
I hate it as well. When I go to log in, I just type in Coda.io but you can’t really log in from the home page. I have to think through the process every time because I think I’m logging in when it turns out I am creating a new account. I catch myself when trying to log in via email. Even worse is when I am logged into one of my many Google accounts and I accidentally create a new Coda account with that Google profile. I no longer log in to delete those bogus Coda accounts. I doubt I’m the only one so I bet you have boatloads of them!
I also manage a second Coda account for a nonprofit run by volunteers, most of which are non-techie. They have no difficulty using Coda as it is so simple! But heaven help me, they can’t stand logging in. And I am sick of helping them. I wrote out the steps 1-2-3 and without looking, it is about 10 steps long which is ridiculous. One thought it would be easier to use the email login method but it only worked once. Not sure what she did wrong but she had to go back to the mega-multi-step email login method.
Please just let us log in via email on the home page like 99% of subscription websites do!
