Considerations and Issues with Alerts + Comments

Hello Coda Team!

Several considerations for improvement with regards to alerts, particularly in the context of rows/table commenting. Overall usability of the alerts can be improved with better understanding and control of how alerts are displayed and with some suggestions:

  1. For the dozens of users we have worked with, they seem highly unaware of the alerts bell even being a thing! >>It’s the most useful feature after we explain it to them<< Perhaps you can make them more prominent somehow, like when they get their first alert?

  2. For the alerts, you can select “this doc only” but once you click on an item and go back to alerts, you have to click on “this doc only” each time…this selection should be sticky for at least until that browser session is closed (for me, ideally forever!).

  3. For alerts, it seems that if you are tagged directly, and you haven’t seen the row with the tagging, then there will be a RED DOT to the left of the comment? Is this accurate?

  4. For alerts, it seems if you haven’t seen a row since something has changed, it will appear LIGHT GREY? There are two suggestions here:

A. When this alert is invoked it can show up multiple times so can you please fix this so it only shows once? For example, if there is two back-and-fourth comments on a thread, there will be an alert for each. You would click on the latest one, having read the prior comments as well. Then sorting back through time on alerts, you see the same thread as “light grey” still and have to click on it to get it to go away. It costs quite a bit of time.

B. It’s unclear to me still what invoked a Light Grey alert. Is it having your user name @ associated in one of the columns of a task that has any change? Any new comment on a row that you created? Any new comment after having previously been @tagged on the row?

Better streaming of alerts would be amazing. Thanks again for this great product!