I’m cleaning up our company’s knowledge base doc and want it to be straightforward to navigate and a clean user experience.
What are some of your best tips when reorganizing and sprucing up your docs?
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These may be kind of beginner tips but I use all of these to make my pages look the best they can!
- Design for practical use. Sometimes I put everything on one page and sometimes I have separate pages for the person who inputs, the people who view or work off it, and the designer. Sometimes I put everything on one page flat, sometimes with toggles, sometimes I use subpages. Utilize pages and toggles to minimize clutter when it’s not needed to be seen by everyone.
- I try to use headers and lines instead of table titles. I name my table and view titles to be clear to what they are so they don’t always look good as a title. I hide most of them.
- Along the same line, turn off table features that you don’t need and are bulky. I have search and the top level add row button turned off for most of my tables if not needed. You can turn off things like this for the page too which I love. I love icons on the sidebar but don’t want to see them on my page.
- Utilize the table setting that lets you customize the default expand or collapsed setting for your tables. That way people are coming onto the document with a clean view rather than everything expanded. You can customize it too if you want one group expanded specifically and others not!
- Use the page locking tools when you can otherwise people are accidentally going to add random spaces just clicking around the document.
- Make charts and buttons match your company colors.
- Allowing somethings to just be minimal. A button can just be white with an icon and no text or no icon and just text.
- Use collapsing and columns when you can. This helps me a lot to make pages look good and when I can’t use them due to it just not being practical, it definitely looks worse.
- I test out different views for tables a lot trying to balance practicality and looks. I also design layouts for every purpose so that it feels like a custom interface more than a bunch of databases. You can even make buttons that open the row utilizing the Switch if formula that make it to where you can customize layouts at a row level.
- Last but such a good one, use text fields in your table to create fake dividers in your layouts. Set the label to none, the size to H1 or H0, the alignment to middle, and use the formula “
LineBreak() + “TITLE”” - this made my layouts look a million times better when I have to put a lot of information on them!
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These are so helpful, thank you!
There’s such a huge focus on functionality within the Coda product and community, and less so on what can make docs clean and actually a delight to use.
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Can you explain this a bit further, Samantha? Or share some images with how you’ve set it up?
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Hi @Stian_Ovesen I’m not sure, but maybe so. If you want to have “space” between the content in your modal.
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Oh! That’s brilliant! Thank you very much.
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That’s a good tip! Thanks all.
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