Full-screen embed UX issues for document viewers

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1

I love the new full-screen embed feature. But it has one major and one minor UX issue when sharing the Coda doc with a user who isn’t logged in to Coda.

If the Coda permission is set to “Anyone with the link can edit”, then users who haven’t logged in see this:

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The giant rounded rectangle blocks them from clicking the “Open link” button in the header to visit the original embedded doc. This is important since even though participants (e.g. our clients) can log in to Coda to dismiss this message, they often choose not to. Whereas the original embedded doc may be in a platform that they already have an edit-enabled credential for (or they’d just like to view the original document without the extra header). But they wouldn’t know how to link to it. The rounded rectangle should be at least a little smaller… or frankly a lot smaller… so the external link is visible.

Second, and more minor, if the Coda doc is shared with permission “Anyone with the link can view”, then users do see the standard “Open link” button at the top, along with a small “View only” badge.

This is (paradoxically) a better experience since the “Open link” button is visible. But in this case the “View only” badge is confusing, since (in this case) a Google Sheet is embedded, and if the client is already logged into Google, they can in fact edit the spreadsheet right inside Coda. I think the “View only” badge should not be shown on full-screen embeds, since you don’t know one way or the other whether this embed permits editing for this user. (E.g. Figma embeds are never editable in place, but Google embeds may be depending on the permissions in the embedded doc.)

2

Many thanks for the details, @Dan_Michaelson!

Agreed on both counts. I wanted to confirm your steps and scenario for the major issue? For context, you should be seeing a much smaller sign-up call to the action to the right — see screenshot below.

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3

Hi, steps to reproduce the “major” issue with the big rounded rectangle that blocks the header:

  1. Create a Coda doc
  2. Share it with permission “Anyone with the link can edit”. Copy the link.
  3. Open an incognito window and paste the link

The behavior is especially problematic when the page being shared is a full-screen embed since the “Open link” CTA is obscured. (Unless the recipient signs into Coda, but some won’t.)

4

Thank you for all the details and confirming, @Dan_Michaelson! We’ll take a deeper look at the “major” issue.

As a quick update, we’ve fixed the “minor” issue, so you should see an update by next week.

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