Welcoming

A warm welcoming to and within the app with clear direction on the steps a user should take to interact and be successful with the app.

A welcome section acts as the first place someone comes to a doc (so you'll share that URL with others). Start docs with the story: the best Coda docs read like "productized blog posts" and give a sense of what the doc is about, who it's targeted to, some of the key insights, etc. Like this one

A delightful doc⁠

! It can take the form of a landing page, tutorial, README, User Guide, or FAQ.

The goal is to drop new users into a place that can give them context of what to expect in the rest of the doc.

⁠

Makers often include the following components:

Who's involved in the doc

The team that uses the doc day-to-day. If you're sharing with another team or with clients, this helps give context on who owns parts of the workflow.

Support contact for when someone wants to improve the doc or when something goes wrong. Ideally this will be someone from the core team, but can be a champion on an IT or technical team.

What the doc does

General info about what the doc tries to solve. Include how it's done today / previously to give give context for how the solution in Coda will improve the user's and stakeholder's lives.

Table of contents that includes all of the important sections. You can copy and paste the URL from another section to make it link.

Where, as a user, you should go first in your journey and what you should do.

You can structure your statements like this: As a [user or persona X] you can [do things thing in this section or table] so that [benefit of using Coda and doing it this way]

Some basic terminology for Coda such as folders, sections, search, views. You can lean on the

Guide to Coda⁠

for this part.

Warnings: Things you probably shouldn't delete or mess with.

Don't forget about

hiding and locking⁠

so that users don't have to even worry about most of the warnings.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.