Improving UX through Unfurling Links

Feature Requests
1

When I paste an external link into a card, it displays the URL. This handling is functional but it creates a couple of issues:

  1. Extra cognitive load: users have to spend extra time and effort interpreting what the link is about. Even worse, they may have to open the link to rediscover what it was about.

  2. To avoid the confusion of the above, users may feel forced to add context in the card. This is a good general practice but not desirable when on the go. Besides, as a general rule, we shouldn’t force users to do things that make sense for them to do.

  3. Numerous cards with long URLs make the card views (list, broadsheet) hard to scan and unattractive.

One solution is to 1) unfurl links into bedded cards, or 2) make the url pretty by displaying the page’s name.

Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts.

2

But you could display a text instead of the URL with [Text](https://somelink.com)

Supernotes does it most of the time automatically if I paste a link.

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3

You’re right, I just noticed that it does this. For some reason it didn’t work yesterday but now it displays the site’s name.

Still, infurling the link, or at least having the option to display it as a card is becoming a best practice.

4

We have plans to improve links in the future.

You are indeed correct, having lots of links within a card can affects it’s readability while editing and this is something we want to address, although unfurling links and offering standalone link previews won’t directly resolve this either within edit mode.

We also don’t want to stray away from the raw Markdown editing experience too much, so will most likely offer a hybrid view, where links over a certain length will be concatenated. i.e. when your cursor is present within the link it will offer the full link url preview and the ability to quickly switch it out for another one.

Some food for thought, we will improve this soon.

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