Hi everyone, I design workspaces in Coda for businesses from different niches. In all my work, the notification and comment system in Coda is one of the biggest challenges for me and my clients. For many, this problem became critical and they had to choose another service over Coda even though Coda had more functionality.
Coda only shows a limited number of comments in the notification center. Comments disappear after a certain amount of time. There is no comment history in the notification center.
In one of the cases I cooperated with a marketing agency. They have dozens of copywriters on their staff and each group of copywriters has its own manager. Each team generates a huge amount of content that requires approval and revisions. Accordingly, this creates a huge flow of comments in the notification center. And the problems start here, when the manager simply misses many comments due to the lack of comment history in the notification center. The problem worsens when managers have days off and a lot of questions from copywriters accumulate. But it turns out that comments disappear from the notification center and only the most recent ones are shown.
Coda basically doesn’t have a single hub for managing notifications and comments. What do I mean by that? Look how it is done in Notion, for example. It saves the whole history of comments, you can mark comments as read or put them in the archive, but without deleting them completely! You can go back to any comment in your space at any time. And the most convenient thing is that the notification center also has a combined activity section in your space. All activity in your space is monitored in one place.
You can read how it works in Notion, for example, here
I think developers should look at best practices that are working great right now.
Coda is an incredibly powerful tool that will amaze you with its capabilities. But it has hit from where you wouldn’t expect it to hit. No simple tables and no functional notification center. Imagine a supercar without wheels. Here’s a rough idea of what it feels like.
The actual notification center has a horrible design. Why such a huge size of cards for each comment? Why do they disappear when marking a comment as read?
I am surprised that the problem with comments is hardly discussed in this portal. Is everyone really satisfied with the present notification system?
Effective communication in the digital workplace is one of the most important factors for productive work. At the moment, Coda does not meet all the requirements in this matter.
