Keeping track of large numbers of notifications

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1

We’re using Coda extensively now, for sales, hiring, project management and more.

It’s quite common that an individual has 5-20 notifications per day, and it’s currently pretty difficult to efficiently review them without losing track, especially if days of notifications start piling up for whatever reason (weekend, vacation, sick, other priorities).

Reviewing the notifications in Email and Slack apps can help but also has problems. I’ll focus on the Coda notifications side pane though for this post.

The base workflow has some problems.

  1. The notification pane can only show a few notifications at a time. New notifications are at the top, but often the ideal workflow is to scroll to the oldest notifications and review those first.
  2. There is no way to mark a notification as read without clicking on it.
  3. Clicking on a notification navigates to the source of that notification and the notification pane loses focus. This can be very cumbersome if a lot of notifications are in the list, since the user has to scroll back to where they are in the list.
  4. There is no filter for unread notifications only.
  5. It’s too easy to become subscribed for notifications. If I change anything on a coda item, I get subscribed to all comments. This can get out of hand quickly.

These aspects, at least for our team so far, makes it difficult to efficiently review notifications and ultimately we are seeing a lot of notifications being missed or ignored.

Some potential solutions to these problems:

  1. Perhaps an entire dedicated page for notifications, to allow for more dedicated space to improve upon the situation.
  2. A way to view only unread notifications.
  3. A way to open the source of the notification without losing focus and navigation in the notification pane.
  4. A way to mark the notification as read (and hide it if the unread-only filter is enabled) without navigating to it.
  5. More options for managing when subscriptions are made to all comments.

Thank you!

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2

can i suggest a possible way to allow each organization to develop their own way of workflowing this notifications overload issue…

provide a way to show notifications as a coda table!

then we can use standard coda techniques to slice n dice the records and provide views, reports, dashboards, automations etc etc

it would need to be a 2 way sync of course

just a thought?

respext
max xyzor

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3

In fact, notification in Coda is a big problem. I came across a case where one employee can receive up to 100 notifications per day. It is impossible to manage such a number of notifications in a real notification panel. Just do it as it is implemented in Notion. Why are old notifications removed from the feed? Why can’t I just mark a notification as read, or even come back to it after as many days as I need? For most people, it’s important to see the entire interaction history.

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