How Trello is different
joelonsoftware.com
joelonsoftware.com
Personally, I'd happily pay for it. I find it incredible easy to use and super user-friendly.
Oddly enough, though, I tried to get my fiance to use it for wedding planning. She claims it makes no sense :) - so I'm not entirely sure it's ready for all walks of life, at least not quite yet. I can't even convince her to let me show her around it. Oh well :)
edit: wow, seriously? downvotes? That's pretty harsh for a thoughtful comment about a useful piece of software that has helped me professionally and personally. Pretty lame, if you ask me.
I'm pretty tech-savvy and it was intimidating at first. There is a lot going on. The first thing I think when I see my Boards page is "Everything is nested." You have options inside of cards inside of boards inside of a board-box. Then click on a card and you have comments and votes and links and activities. Everything has its own 1px box-shadow which sections things in my head I don't think should be sectioned; for instance, comments inside of cards look like they should be clickable because of how every link has the same border and box-shadow. The description, however, has no such border but is the same size font as the "Edit this description" link, which makes that block have no focus.
It's a great service, though— kind of like a big to-do list. Considering they just released it a couple months ago, the UI is great even with those gripes. I just think it was trying to be a little too nondescript. (I'm probably going to catch some flack for this here, but...) I would have liked to see the boards look like cork boards and the cards look like cards pinned to them. It would have been easier to understand the workflow a bit better.
I introduced my (non-technical) girlfriend to it, and after a short explanation of how I used it, she took to it immediately, and uses it daily to keep track of her to-do list.
The way I see it, she really likes wedding planning, so I'm not going to rock the boat too much by pushing Trello, haha.
PS: No, I did not downvote you. Although, reading the praise with Steve Jobs-like phrases (a.k.a typical marketer style talk, exaggerating a tiny thing as if they were the gold) tend to irk me a bit toward most North Americans.
It sounds like you'd be surprised at how little I sound like a typical marketer if you met me in person.
I just did that e-book on Scrum (shameless plug: http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/scrummaster/18803035), and I used Trello for all the task tracking. In fact, I plugged it in the book as the best online Agile/Scrum tool I've seen so far, even providing instructions on how to use it working remotely with Scrum or Agile. I'm using it to prioritize vacation spots for our family this year, my vitamin list, some tasks I'm farming out offshore, and another book project. I also have another website idea that I'm getting ready to load up.
Things I'd like to see? 1) Linked boards. Have the same column appear as the end of one board and the beginning of another. This could allow you to have several boards with different audiences but they would all work together. 2) downloadable data. I know you guys say you want to do this, but closed data is a deal-killer for me. 3) Make it work on my iPad. Seriously. Being able to update using finger gestures on a extremely portable device would be sweet.
If you guys haven't tried it, you should. I am not a big fan of online Agile-like tools, but this rocks. Just a simple list of stuff and customizable columns to move the items around. I think the Fog Creek guys are really on to something here.
The problem with simple products is that everyone has a different idea of what simple means and think their core feature set is what everyone else would want as well.
https://trello.com/card/board/data-export/4d5ea62fd76aa11360...
[0]: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html [edit: here's a fanastic, transcendent presentation by Christensen: http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e0...]
# Target Audience?
When you look at who is using trello right now you will find mostly agile teams, startups, freelancers, engineers, designers who do software development.
IIRC this is also the reason it originally got built. The team wanted to scratch their own itch and I think they did a good job.
I like trello a lot. I dig Joel and joelonsoftware and am curious what the future holds. I hope it won't end up as a misunderstood tool by trying to be everything to everyone.
# Niche vs Horizontal
If you are interested in the trade offs related to going niche vs going horizontal I think 'Crossing the Chasm' and 'Inside the Tornado' are great books to read.
# Disclaimer
I'm working on https://www.blossom.io which has a feature set similar to trello but is aimed at people who deeply care about product development.
1) Who did your design for the public page / sign-on process? </br> 2) What's your long term goal with the product itself compared to where it stands now?
Long term vision of the product: be the best team coordination solution for product development.
Since I used the word 'best', here's the context:
* cross functional teams
* lean/agile methodology
* care about what they create
* care about their customer
* care about UX
Long term vision for us ourselves (company): serve the above as good as we can by providing tools that help people to focus on delivering value and getting great products out of the door :) which btw is really really exciting
> It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an "installed software" version of Trello.
We already use the installed version of FogBugz at work and I had hoped that Trello might some day be provided in this form too. Ideally, we'd have wanted FogBugz and Trello to work together in some way.
Unfortunately, using a hosted version of Trello is not an option due to insurmountable problems with the procurement and information governance processes within my company.
We host a lot of sites on our custom CMS and it makes life so much easier to role bug fixes and db updates when there is only 1 code base to update. Also you don't have issues where people are on older version and need to update through versions
We try push all our customers into this model with those exact reasons.
Business involves tradeoffs.
Most people do prefer if someone else hosts the software (which is why most web-based software is hosted).
It's much cheaper for a business to maintain one hosted version than support many customers that host it themselves.
Going for a bigger market that is also cheaper to support is exactly the kind of decision that a rational business would make.
We actually discussed this very point in work today, I still class our product, 2 years down the line, to be in beta. We are actively working towards a version 1, if you will.
We could revisit at a later point and probably will but the time it would take to document all db changes and create a version every day would far outweigh the benefits.
Distributing to other peoples data centers comes with it's own host of issues as well, we would have to charge for a maintenance contract for 1. We would need to bring on a customer service team to support people. At the minute, bug fixes can come straight to developers via our technical director as we can deploy straight away. We would need a team to asses what their setup is, if they have everything needed installed etc etc.
Deployment to our own servers helps us and the customer a lot, we don't charge a lot for hosting, our uptime last year was over 99.97% and bug fixes and functionality are rolled out on a daily basis without interaction from the customer.
We did a massive project recently that the customer ended up deployment on their own $5 hosting company, turned out the company didn't support what we needed and we ended up coding around the road blocks. Ended up costing the customer more.
In the specific case of my current employer I can say that we have enough budget to pay a few dollars per seat per day without blinking, and we'd choose this option even if a hosted Trello option was ten times cheaper.
There are two main constraints that need to be taken into account where I work when it comes to buying things:
Firstly, variable pricing models are a no-go. We'll happily pay well over the odds to secure abundant capacity but we need to know in advance with absolute certainty exactly how much it will cost for a full year of service.
Secondly, we deal with potentially sensitive information that could be damaging to our organisation and our government if it were in any way compromised. Because of this we need to retain control of the data we'd store in any kind of issue tracking or collaboration system.
Trello is clearly a great tool and I hope Joel et al do well with it. It's a great tool for agile teams to use, and I can only blame the bureaucracy of my organisation for preventing my small team's ability to use it.
Don't be in a hurry to change that. It's a good thing.
They may think such cases don't support "get big fast". But they might be wrong about that. A lot of software (Excel) is first propagated through work usages, and workplace availability might provide important vectors to 100mm users.
Now, users on a client-dedicated server won't help scale their data operations. But they will help spread the word and introduce use cases. And provide a target for developers / consultants to build out applications.
Even if some corporate solution doesn't seem a priority, they might want to dedicate some time to serving a few such edge cases. Just to keep an eye on that niche and keep themselves somewhat adapted to the requirements.
1) You have to get remote access to it. This probably means setting up a VPN. Probably some weird thing the client uses, which only works on Windows XP. And is unbearably slow, and is down at random times.
2) You have to coordinate upgrades with the local administration. Need to reboot to apply a Windows patch? Best make sure there will be someone available if it turns out you need to hit F1 in the BIOS to continue. IPMI/KVM-IP help with this, but add cost (and security concerns).
3) Hardware failure? You get to deal with the local admins (are they competent? Do they know the hardware you picked? Did they keep track of the spares you sent?—you did send spares, right?). Or worse, fly someone there.
4) "The page loads slow". Now you get to debug the client's internal network! —assuming you can even get to the box, over same broken internal network. So even better, you get to debug the client's internal network, over the phone with whoever their IT department can spare—and who definitely believes its not their problem.
5) Monitoring. Yeah. That's going to be difficult if you only have access to it at all with that Windows XP VPN client (which automatically times the connection out after 15 minutes, security and all ya' know). Hopefully the client can do it. Monitoring means more than just "is it up"; it also includes "how close to capacity are we", "are we seeing any weirdness that'd indicate problems", etc.
6) It's a single client on the box. So they will ask you at some point "oh, we're really busy this month, please don't upgrade it, we can't risk it breaking". And you'll be hard-pressed to say no, after all, they client will point out that just not deploying is less work for you.
6b) "except we found this one critical bug, we need a patch for it ASAP"
7) When you own the boxes, you can keep things consistent. Want to upgrade RAM on all your web servers? Go ahead. You'll have very few configuration differences. Want to upgrade the RAM on the box at the client? Yeah, you'll need to open a ticket with their IT department, they'll get back to you sometime.
8) A client that demands their own local box is also one that's likely to be paranoid in other ways—they'll want to know who (on your team) has accessed the box, when, and why; they'll bug you about it; they may want a say in who you can hire to administer it; etc. This may or may not be justified (e.g., it probably is for the DoD). But it'll surely be a pain.
9) Utilization of boxes you host is going to be higher—the client's box will need to be sized for peak times, but will be 99.9% idle off-hours. Also, the client boxes will probably be lower-capacity (to be cheaper). Fewer users per box = more boxes. More boxes = more administration. Especially when they're different.
Some customers will have competent admins, who like to solve problems themselves, they probably won't be a huge issue (except for the ones who do crazy and insane things). Other customers won't, and you'll get contacted all the time.
I can only use trello for mumdane work tasks or personal work if there is no self hosted solution.
This decision is a mistake, Joel. I love trello, but i cannot trust a hosted solution with my plans for taking over a market. Please give us an installable version. anything else is amature hour or naive.
Joel is exaggerating for effect. Yes, many spreadsheets are static lists. But how far would a spreadsheet product get without formulas? As soon as you wanted to add prices to your grocery list, you'd be stuck.
His critique of Improv is interesting. (Steve Jobs adored Improv for years btw.) He's saying that by imposing more structure on the free-form grid, Improv lost the ad hoc users.
The free-form grid is the most important thing about spreadsheets. But interactivity (formulas/recalc) is part of that, even when you're not using it.
Also, surely one of the reasons so many people used it to make lists was that it was the tool Office shipped with that had gridlines (Word has them too, but they're clunky). If you bundle a spreadsheet along with the world's most popular word processor, it's no wonder it gets used for pedestrian tasks in addition to the ones Bricklin thought about.
This is a point Spolsky danced around in a much earlier blog post: 80% of users want just 20% of the features of a program, but they're not the same 20%.
I'm not a process guy, because I usually can't justify the time it takes to 'maintain the process' except with trello since it's effortless to use, it's almost always a win to jot thoughts down whenever something remember-worthy appears in your head :)
The OP's original comment contains entire praise for the product being described in the article, almost the point to marketing speak -- "it's one of the few products that we use at work, but doesn't feel like work to use".
It also contains multiple smile faces in the post, which make it feel disingenuous. Almost no comments on Hacker News contain smile faces, so mix this with the praise, and people could take it as a comment that seemed fake.
I definitely "added to the discussion".
My main UX complaint is the fact that to do any real planning stuff that makes it better than a text file requires opening up the Menu of Everything for an item after creation time. There's a lot of whitespace next to the "Add" and "X" buttons when creating a new item, something as simple as offering a shortlist of the most commonly used labels or something would be nice.
Also the uploads and notes are very easy to absorb and view. Delegation also looks great... though I haven't had a need to use or see how it integrates with email.
I used it for trip planning, meeting planning and personal checklists. However since it's hosted and it's unclear what the data security is like, I don't use it for work related stuff.
Mostly, it's just very very easy to start using and easy on the eyes. I'm drawn to finding uses for it, though I keep wanting calendar/scheduling support (which would make it more of a full-on process/group ware)
- make your product web based & free - get users, worry about revenue later - keep it horizontal as much as possible
Maybe this is all part of the new long term bottom up strategy for getting into Enterprises?
Get Enterprise users using your product, get them to bring it in the Enterprise door and further down the line find a way to monetize.
It will be interesting to see who comes out on top. I see a lot more innovation to come in this space.
Why not embrace that fact and go with it to make it a great tool for software developers?
horizontal use, on the other hand, would be something like FogBugz: pitched to one or two organizational segments in the company silo and developed in a way that takes advantage of the knowledge gained by an in-depth understanding of those few segments.
maybe I just have my axes wrong; i'm not pedantic about it but that's what I always thought.
maybe I just have my axes
A vertical product would target just one silo. It doesn't matter that not everyone at each company in that silo would use the product, what is important is that the product is only meant to be used by companies in that silo. An example would be software to x-rays. This would be used by some people at the companies in the healthcare silo, but would be of no use to anyone in the banking silo. The product would be tailored to exactly the task that needs to be completed.
A horizontal product would target many or all of the silos. The product would have no specific focus, but would be intended to be generally useful. An example of this would be Excel. Almost all companies in every silo would have someone who uses Excel. They may also use it for vastly different purposes requiring the software to be somewhat generic and the end user to figure out how to use the software to complete the task at hand.
If you want to know your team's capacity, you have to limit the number of tasks they work on at the same time. Once you limit WIP, several interesting things will happen:
* A backlog of tasks will emerge.
* You will be able to measure how much time is spent on each task.
* Tasks will get finished faster.
The first two results are not very surprising because by introducing WIP limits, you have effectively eliminated multitasking, but how on earth, do tasks get finished faster?
Unlike computers with multiple processor cores, our brains have one or at best two cores. Without WIP limits, when there are too many tasks to work on, we spend more time on switching tasks than the tasks themselves.
Bottlenecks become visible. Since everyone is working on a limited number of tasks, some finish theirs on time, some get overloaded, and some cannot finish their work because they need input from those who are overloaded. Team members with free capacity can help those who are overloaded. Better yet, they can even come up with ideas on how to fix the newly discovered bottlenecks.
Disclaimer: I am the author of http://flow.io , a lean project management application based on kanban.
To be fair, bulletin boards with index cards don't have WIP limits either.
It is unlikely a system light enough for frictionless kanban will have an accurate understanding of the work-width (units of work / units of time) of a given task. For example, in your tour, "58% complete" of "Custom CSS for homepage" is suspiciously precise.
The two are not equivalent. It is as if I said that without polite discourse you don't have a productive debate, and someone else called me an idiot for claiming that good manners and threaded comments are all HN needs.
Automagic WIP limits may not be necessary for imlementing kanban, but that's a deign debate, not a what-is-kanban debate. You may have a good point about whether WIP limits are necessary for a good "implementing kanban" application.
If you have to mentally keep track of WIP, inside each team member's head, you lose pretty much all of that.
Sometimes you just can't let something else wait until you are done with what you were doing. Sometimes you were doing something that can't meaningfully progress until something else has been fixed. Rigid computer enforced rules like that just mean that people will have to work around them, wasting energy and producing the wrong things.
I've been on a Kanban team for the past year now and I can say with confidence that if our tool didn't track WIP, we would be less effective as a team.
Software development needs to be flexible because each problem is unique and different from all the others in important aspects.
Kanban is a tool on a long, long, long list of tools which software developers should learn to use, modify adapt and improve to become better programmers. Trello is one item on that list. And yes, it can be used for Kanban, if the team wants to -- just like you could use an actual whiteboard.
I use Trello for "business project management" (marketing copy, emailing people, customer development todos) and pivotal for "technical project management".
Why does Review19 have to provide the in-browser video conferencing? Why can't people just use Skype or GMail's video chat? It seems like an enormously difficult-to-develop, bandwidth-intensive feature that people can already get elsewhere for free. I'm genuinely curious what critical benefit this integration provides for the users of Review19.
What if they decide to shut down some day? You lose everything. Unlikely? yes. Possible? Also yes.
Offer a backup function, and I'm yours.
Now that the API is 'done', it shouldn't be long until this is up and running. More about data, privacy, etc. here: trello.com/privacy
Trello though, I find myself using more and more just for my overall kanban/burn of what I need to be doing at any oen time -- something I've struggled to get setup (my own initiative) in Fogbugz. I wish I could pull in my FogBugz filters but I'm sure others are requesting such things.
Trello is a great shared to-do list, and dare I say maybe even more relevant to getting things done than Basecamp, for me.
Is this some type of SEO strategy avoiding too many links being penalized?
When managing a project, having multiple buckets that contain lists, and being able to quickly scan the buckets is highly effective. With linear lists, I sometimes forget to check one of my lists, or the list gets stale, and things fall into the cracks. Because it spreads all my lists out on a single board, Trello (the HTML version, anyway) helps me avoid this.
I agree that linked boards would be a great enhancement.
If only the UI wasn't so sluggish.
I tried both Opera and Firefox, so I guess it's just the fact that I'm on a relatively low-powered machine (netbook, 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM) but frankly I don't see it doing much that should be so slow. Now GMail can be similarly sluggish, but GMail doesn't require me to drag boxes around at 2-3 frames per second.
Even the highlight-on-mouseover effect has a delay before it happens, and there is no excuse for that since it should not take any time unless you're doing all sorts of things between mouseover and setting the highlight. Switching that around would already make the UI feel so much more responsive: Always indicate responsiveness feedback first before you make the user wait for anything else.
I can think of some things that might be causing this. Maybe there's zillions of JS events that are listened for and being triggered even when they don't effectively do anything in that particular app state.
Partially, it's because at some points the responsiveness feedback vs waiting for something being done is the wrong way around for providing a snappy UI feel.
And when I drag a card around, it gets CSS transform rotated, and a rather big drop shadow. All sorts of other UI elements have subtle shadows and glows and I bet they're all done in CSS. It definitely looks nice, no argument about that, but if you're going for a really simple but super-useful tool, you shouldn't be sacrificing usability for eyecandy.
Especially the card box dropshadow, if you're going to animate it, don't do it in CSS, use a semi-transparent PNG instead. Yes CSS3 is very nice, but you do realize that the browser is (inefficiently) recalculating the gaussian shadow blur every frame?
Maybe the easiest thing would be to have an option in the preferences to switch off the "special effects" so that everything is just plain CSS boxes with borders (that can increase in thickness on mouseover, instead of increasing their box-shadow blur radius ...), that don't need to slightly rotate when you drag them.
Or maybe you could consider what it means to build a really simple, powerful web application that is an absolute pleasure to use, and whether that really requires using the latest CPU-heavy special effects and animating them.
Hm. This sounds logical, but is it really true?
But since they think they've found a new form of "Data structure that anyone can find helpful", they'd rather try to get everyone using it than try to specialize it for a few verticals that might pay them a lot of money for a form of it that is optimized for their business.
Trello feels like web-based org-mode. For simple use, it is almost as flexible, and it has groups and sharing built in. Nicely done.
That was the first widely adopted kanban tool for developers that I know about
BWAHAHHAHHAHHA. Ha. heh. whee! It's a good product but good luck on that part, Joel. Support costs for massive free products are probably more expensive than you imagine.
Joel will only host a relatively small amount of text -- which should be a lot less expensive.
Also, Trello is really easy to just close, a paper you'll have to hide it manually, going analog sometimes is good.
Funny I find I have the exact opposite 'problem'. Trello is always there on my bookmark bar on every computer I own, one click away from viewing anywhere I happen to be. On the other hand I tend to lose any paper to do list I make, and even when I don't lose them, half the time they're not where I happen to be.
Still wondering where org mode fits.
"You agree that You will not:
(a) upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
(j) intentionally or unintentionally violate any applicable local, state, national or international law, including, but not limited to, regulations promulgated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, any rules of any national or other securities exchange, including without limitation, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ, and any regulations having the force of law;
(l) promote or provide instructional information about illegal activities, promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promote any act of cruelty to animals. This may include, without limitation, providing instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons or incendiary devices."
So, basically, my associates and I can't use Trello to make our plans for world domination. Back to the index cards, guys.
SERIOUSLY: Content-restrictive ToS, which is now the norm, is killing the Internet, possibly with even greater efficacy than DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, and their ilk, combined, because it proactively chills speech. Congratulations on a nice product, but no matter how nice it is, or how much nicer it becomes, the ToS makes Trello unusable to me, as well as to many of the people who ignore the fine print, and who will therefore end up losing their accounts over trivialities.
"The business goal for Trello is to ultimately get to 100 million users. That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated."
Every single day people say out loud, "I'm so glad for Trello.". It is a remarkable product that our team is madly in love with.
Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node.
But at least they’re having fun. And in today’s tight job market,
great programmers have a lot of sway on what they’re going to be working on.
The job market is open enough right now that if people are ever unhappy, they can just go find a new job instead of dealing with their current one.
If the programmers chose some esoteric technology and not take ownership of the project then yeah, it's bad. But if the programmers decided to stick with it, live and breathe Node.js and do whatever it takes to fix all bugs (including fix the internal of Node.js when needed) and work overtime then by all means, why not?
I personally would not prefer to be in that situation as I have different priority but I become to accept other people preferred methods given that others agreed and willing to stick with it 110%.
PS: Beside, the choice wasn't too bad, it's not like they decided to use Lua or Smalltalk. They're using CoffeeScript/JavaScript (maybe), Node, WebSockets, Socket.io, etc. There are JavaScript programmers out there.
If you choose an unknown technology because you have solid reasons to believe it will bring a substantial advantage to the product, which will offset the loss in productivity, then sure. If you choose it just so that your team will be motivated and you willingly take the productivity hit for that, I find it difficult to understand.
It's not the technology choice, it's the reasons that seem weird to me. It's probably because of the runway length they have that they can venture into unknown territory for no reason other than trying things.
I'm reminded of Asana and Lunascript - a fun experiment you can afford when you have lots of money in the bank, but not something I'd see as practical.
Also, don't forget that these people have to invent the product as well, not just code it. Their productivity as inventors may be a lot higher on their preferred platform.
Obviously, it's not the same for every kind of product, but Fog Creek doesn't make medical devices.
I heard there are more works to clean up Rails codebases nowadays.
As of recently, I'm primarily using Java and I can say with confident that while it is old and boring, there are plenty knowledge sharing out there that elevates the brain of many developers (even by a small amount). Not to mention that the libraries have evolved in a much greater pace to support recent best practices (MVC, DB migration, unit-test, DI, mock, BDD, TDD, you name it, the Java community have them).