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Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

Trello is one of those products I've come to love with an almost insane passion. You'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. It has become indispensable for me.

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.

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>Oddly enough, though, I tried to get my fiance to use it for wedding planning. She claims it makes no sense :)

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 agree with being at the point where I'd happily pay for it (I'd actually pay for a mobile and faster desktop version that sync, as it's a bit sluggish on my netbook). What Joel said about it being a list of lists (a very simple idea), is what I like so much about it. Currently I'm using it for standard simple use cases (keeping track of stuff I need to do), non-standard use cases (tracking my weightlifting progress, between each set), and collaboration (my landlord and I keep a list of things to do). Oddly enough, I don't use it for software at all (what I investigated it for in the first place).

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.

Yeah, it's kind of a mystery to me why my fiance doesn't like it. I suspect it has more to do with fearing the unknown when it comes to new software over actual usability concerns.

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.

Can I ask, was your girlfriend already an organized person?

Nope, but she's trying to be one. She's like me, organization is something we both don't do naturally, but are trying to improve at.

Personally, I found Trello quite straightforward to use, but in my opinion that straightforwardness depends heavily on the hacker-like mindset of thinking of everything in terms of levels of abstraction. Other sensible mindsets and organizational techniques exist, but I don't think they would align as obviously with Trello. It might still work, but not necessarily in an instantly obvious way.

I find Trello to be confusing at first because there are too many elements in the screen. Not to mention the real-time update kind of steal away your focus to "hey.. something just got updated in my screen"

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.

Wow, the whole of North America huh? I guess you must know a lot of people from the over 40 countries that make up the continent of North America in order to make generalizations about them.

I suppose my comment did have somewhat of a "Steve Jobs-like quality" to them. Yes, I happened to get a bit excited about a product I like when I was writing about it on the internet. It's not the end of the world.

It sounds like you'd be surprised at how little I sound like a typical marketer if you met me in person.

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