We were hoping to onboard our entire organisation and were happy to pay for all the maker seats, but there are quite a few things we are not understanding.
One such example is subfolders. It would appear that Coda’s navigation problem has long been a source of preventing new paying users, but having digested all the posts throughout the years, it would appear there are still no solutions.
Confusingly, the platform currently has a feature called the ‘quick nav’ bar. This allows users to access their folders from any page in order to quickly navigate to where they need to get to next, which, of course, is a standard feature for similar tools and makes sense why it’s therefore called the ‘quick nav’ bar.
What I and every employee I’ve run this past are struggling to understand is the logic behind restricting the platform to the small number of businesses that are small enough to only require a tiny handful of folders. I say this as Coda appears to bizarrely not offer subfolders, and so with only a flat list of folders, users would be expected to scroll through that entire list, reading the name of each folder until they find the desired one. That might be fine for tiny businesses with less than 10 folders, but it’s seemingly impossible for anyone else.
To put that into perspective, it only takes just 3 hierarchical levels with 10 folders in each to reach 1000 folders. With subfolders, a user only needs to read a maximum of 10 folder names per subfolder level to find what they are looking for, so just 30 names, instead of all 1000 without subfolders! In terms of time, assuming as little as just 2 seconds to read each folder name would be the difference between 60 seconds with subfolders vs 32 minutes (2000 seconds) without subfolders. Do that, say 10 times each day, and you’re looking at 10 minutes total time with subfolders vs approaching 6 hours each day without subfolders! Wasting 6 hours just to find a folder on 10 different occasions is madness. And that’s just one of the many reasons why subfolders are simply mandatory for almost all but a small handful of users!
No solutions:
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The ‘shortcut folders’ functionality doesn’t negate the issue.
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The folder search box is only useful if one remembers the folder’s name and if the search box is available, which it doesn’t appear to be in places like the move folder feature.
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Maintaining an org map Doc doesn’t resolve the issue as it would not be quickly accessible via the sidebar/quick navbar.
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In one post, a Coda employee suggested the use of a ‘list pack’, but we have not been able to ascertain what that is exactly and how that would be accessible from the ‘quick nav’ bar?
Considering the concept of subpages has already been implemented, there must be a reason why the designers of Coda think that businesses wouldn’t require subfolders. What if a business has more than a few departments or business processes and then a handful of hierarchical levels within each of those departments or business processes?
I even got into the habit of showing the platform to as many people as possible just to watch the utter shock and bewilderment on their faces when I drop the bombshell that everything has to be managed without subfolders - it’s hilarious. None of this seems to make any sense to anyone here!
We are so confused. The fact that even the developers have stated that the subfolders/nesting folders functionality has been requested so much (even spanning back through so many many years) but they have never done anything about it, suggests it’s almost as if Coda is only being targeted at the small handful of small businesses without hierarchies and therefore allowing them to be able to manage using the platform without subfolders. I believe Coda has just over 10 thousand users vs Notions’ 100 million. Surely, it would be more sensible of Coda to do everything it can to attract more users, not limit them to such an extent.
I’ve run this past several of our engineers, and they have all unanimously pleaded that the implementation of subfolders would be an “easy job” and that it’s crazy not to provide them from day dot. I guess the questions still remain: What is it about subfolders that the developers are potentially so against? Is Coda more aimed at small organisations that only ever have a tiny handful of departments or business processes, and so a flat, hiraracy-less structure is manageable for them?
This all seems so out of the ordinary that we’d love to hear how companies are expected to use the platform with this limitation, as there is definitely a possibility we are missing something completely obvious here.
Even better, if anyone knows why users are being forced into this restriction, that would also be super interesting.
Huge thanks to anyone who has any ideas!
(If any Coda employees are reading this, please feel free to reach out via DM or request my email - cheers!)
Thank you.