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  • Introducing Super Simple Shared Zap Updates!

Introducing Super Simple Shared Zap Updates!

Categories: Product Updates
Introducing Super Simple Shared Zap Updates!

Hey, y'all! I'm JC, a backend engineer here at Zapier.

We've shipped a feature for Shared Zaps that shows an "Update my link" button to make it nice and easy for you, as an author, to make updates - big or small - to your Zap and see those reflected for folks who access your link. Once you've opened up the sharing modal, you can click it, and we'll serve the mostest freshest and awesomest version of your Zap to whoever visits the link. Neat!

How does this look, you might ask? Ok, get ready for my 2000+-word essay on.... okay, okay! It's _actually_ just two pictures and a small description, but since pictures are worth a thousand words....

When you edit your Shared Zap and click the "Share" button, you'll get a super clear message telling you your Zap's changed, and if you want those changes to be saved, you can just click "Update my link"!

Screen Shot 2020-02-13 at 01.21.59.png

Once you do, you'll also get a nice confirmation message and a friendly prompt suggesting you make sure that the title and description still apply.

Screen Shot 2020-02-12 at 22.56.55.png

The main benefit here is for you, as a Shared Zap creator, to be able to keep improving your Zaps and making sure that any folks that install them into their accounts will get the latest version. Please do let me know if you have any questions or feedback - we'd love to hear what you think!


Go forth and share all the things!


Hi @jccoto

Cool stuff! Congrats to you and the team for shipping this.

I must say I always thought that anybody clicking the share link would get the latest version at the time of their click - so it's good to know this isn't/wasn't the case.


Thanks for calling that out, @AndrewJDavison_Luhhu ! You're absolutely right - the wording there wasn't super clear. This improvement aims to fix it and make things easier to understand when sharing Zaps.

If you've got any other feedback, we'd love to hear it.


Cheers!


@jccoto One oddity for me is that the zap has to be switched on when you setup the share, but can then be turned off again after. Not sure on the reasoning behind this?


@AndrewJDavison_Luhhu great question! The main reasoning behind this constraint is that we want to make sure that the Zap is actually set up before sharing it. We want to prevent incomplete or low-quality Zaps from being shared, if we can!

This feature is also part of the work the sharing team is looking into as we continue to improve sharing. It's definitely interesting to hear there's a mental model disconnect with it, and we'll definitely take it into consideration.


Cheers!


@jccoto - From my point of view, one of my use cases is to build a bunch of rough templates then create links to aide easy deployment inside client accounts.

For those zaps I’d probably not fill in all the fields because I know I’d be configuring that all individually in the client accounts later - but of course if I don’t build them out fully I can’t create the share links.


@AndrewJDavison_Luhhu that's a very interesting use case - we definitely hadn't thought of it. Thanks for giving us something to mull over 🤩!

I can't promise we'll lift that constraint, but we'll definitely consider a use case like this.

A couple follow-up questions, if you wouldn't mind giving me more information about what you'd like to do 🤓:

  1. Does our current version of automatic field mapping (the feature that sets up consumers' Zaps based on their own account data, not the creator's, automatically when installing) not guess fields well enough, or enough fields?
  2. Does how sharing works now cause you pain or do you find that you need to do more work with our defaults than setting the Zaps up yourself?

I'm asking because it'd be awesome if we could get to a point where installing a Zap on consumers' accounts Just Worked (tm) and you'd be able to do your intended use case "almost magically." Of course, I can't promise that's what will happen, but we'd definitely like to get as close as possible!


Thanks so much for your feedback, again! This is great!


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