Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams | Hacker News Reader

Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

droptask.com

121 pointsdavidjgraph68 comments

Have to admit - from the video and a five minute play I find it very hard to imagine using this for anything.

The information density is very low. Doesn't seem to allow you to easily order tasks beyond dates. Lousy on phones. I could go on.

List aren't boring... there useful. I don't go to my project management software to be entertained - I go there to get shit done ;-)

What I want to know when I go to project management software is what everybody is doing now and what needs to be done next and by whom. This interface seems to hinder not help with that.

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload.

When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything becomes the same importance. And when you have 1000 items of the same importance, nothing is important. This is a design paradigm used on information. I think it works well to describe the problem.

There's no list structure that yet exists that solves this problem. Nothing that brings your list of 1000+ things into a manageable analogue of what is actually important for you to see and do at any given time, in any given context.

I don't think this is it, but it's getting closer. And "lists" are still not sufficient. We can do better.

I'm no programmer but I suddenly thought of a possible solution - adaptive sizing. Depending on the importance, the first few words of the task would appear bigger or smaller appropriately. I'm sure this would work great on the desktop but I have no idea how good this can be designed to appear on a mobile phone screen (3.5-4.5inches).

Yes, I'm thinking along those lines. I have a product idea for solving this problem... just no time. :)

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload.

The product video emphasised "say goodbye to boring lists of tasks" which was why I mentioned it ;-)

The point I was trying to make was that boredom wasn't really a pain point for PM software.

When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything becomes the same importance. And when you have 1000 items of the same importance, nothing is important. This is a design paradigm used on information. I think it works well to describe the problem.

You stated the problem very well - if everything looks equally important then nothing is.... so don't do that ;-)

I've easily about 500 items organised on various kanban style boards ATM (not all in trello). That's actually pretty low for us. I've worked with places that successfully do this with many, many more than that.

The thing that the OP missed in comparing droptask to trello and similar tools is that you're not just making lists - you're modelling the process you're using to do work too. For me droptask makes it harder to deal with that information overload - not easier - since it seems to be focused on task categorisation - not workflow modelling.

When I'm looking at our company's current-work board I can see - at a glance - what folk are doing right now (the WIP column), what's blocked (the blocked column), what's been done in the last seven days or so (done), and what's coming up in the next week or so (on deck column) and so on.

Once a week we make sure the backlog on that board is topped up with another week's worth of work from a separate general-work board. Takes an hour tops as part of our weekly retrospective. Usually more like ten minutes.

With have a few class-of-service rules that decide whether incoming work goes onto the current-work board or the general work board.

Once a month we spend an afternoon sanity checking the general work board against our company goals and cull / re-prioritise as appropriate.

(It's a little bit more complicated than this - since we have some external public-facing boards we use for client work and some volunteer efforts we're involved with, plus create separate boards for one-off tasks like recruitment and for tracking our consulting sales funnel, etc).

In short I find that prioritised lists are a stupidly effective for visualising our workflow. Droptask seems to only have date-based ordering which is a very blunt - and often counter productive - tool to help prioritise work.

It seems a step backwards to me.

Hey Adrian,

Can I show you a mockup I have that addresses the prioritizing problem?

Let me know.

yeah sure - email address is on my profile page or just ask google ;)

It's certainly "prettier" than Trello, but I'm not sure how functional it would actual be in a real world scenario. There's no functional benefit as far as I can see to putting things in fancy-looking circles, and (I'm imagining) the usability of that interface is severely diminished as you start to get a large number of items in any particular category.

A great example of how great UI doesn't necessarily equate to great UX, in my opinion.

The circles actually seems to reduce value because there is no intuitive order to each group. In some (many?) use cases for Trello, priority is important.

One thing that the circle metaphor does add is nested groups, which I can see being important for a different set of use cases.

Video wouldn't load for me, but I gather that priority is indicated by the size of the circle?

That said, I tend to agree. Trello works at least in part because it's immediately intuitive to anyone who's ever made a "to-do" list or used cards-on-a-whiteboard to manage a project.

The Droplist approach is a cool idea though, and for some things it might be better.

I played with it a bit and unless I missed something, the size of the circle is only related to how many other circles are inside it.

> I played with it a bit and unless I missed something, the size of the circle is only related to how many other circles are inside it.

This is true - the group (used to categorize task circles) grows to fit the content. We did play with allowing task circles to be resized to show priority/effort, etc, but couldn't get it to work well. We may revisit it, though.

Can't you order the circles any way you like?

Sort of. You can rearrange the task circles, but they float into a somewhat arranged layout. In practice this means that the order is not immediately obvious.

I haven't decided if I agree with you. I was able to convert 2 Trello boards to it in under 10 min (smaller boards). Pretty much the circles equated to the columns the way I was using in Trello (todo, waiting on, in process, done) however I liked the idea that I could break out todo into multiple circles based on the channels the tasks came through. I then was able to color code all the circles for easy visibility. I am not saying I am by any means a convert from Trello at this point, but the fact I could get all this up in a rather quick manner and have a quick visual representation to look at quickly was nice and gives me enough faith to test it out for a week or two.

Note: Trello has this color representation also with editable labels, of course. For some reason I dig the circles though.

Bingo. The whole point of Trello is to mock up some manual end-to-end process. The natural state of this is columns that consist of "Backlog, TODO, Doing, Done". More advanced versions of this look something like, "Vetting, Grooming, Backlog, TODO, Doing, Done".

The circles kind of kill the whole point of a taskboard, IMO.

I also usually insert a "Paused" between TODO and Doing in case a "Doing" task stalls out. Rather than putting it back into TODO, I use Paused to indicate that once the issue that's causing it to stall is remedied, it's at the absolute top of the priority queue to get worked on.

Yep. I've seen this too, usually as the "Blocked" state at the end of the process. Items that go in the blocked state need a blocked reason.

I think this could be a great addition to the normal list view. Different people process things better or worse with pictures vs lists vs charts,etc.

I think this could be a great tool for planning or just looking at a snapshot of your day, developer, project, etc.But in order to be a full fledged issue tracker, you need to be able to filter, report,pivot,etc.

Just my two cents.I think it looks great and is promising.

Trello really excels as a smartphone app. It is especially clean and functional in that setting. This approach, while pretty in the browser, probably couldn't function on a smartphone.

That's the coolest web app demo video I've seen, possibly ever! Looking forward to trying it. I actually visualize tasks as bubbles or blobs in my head, so this should be interesting.

This looks useful, beside looking prettier because it gives you a quick overview of everything and lets you zoom in/out on the specific activities, it feels more productive, the only thing that is non apparent is how dependent or subsequent tasks may be clearly visualized with this approach in my opinion.

I like it. It lets me see all the items at a higher level. The best part so far is that I can move groups into one another.

Using it quickly makes me want a couple of features:

- not needing drag n drop for something (like creating a new task or group - be default putting them in the previous group or top level)

- being able to add tasks that are at the intersection of two groups. I imagine this would look something like a venn-diagram.

Finally, I am reluctant to support a startup unless I know how you are planning to survive. Is it going to be advertisement? not yet release feature? large teams? Once you do this, I will be more comfortable telling others.

From FAQ:

   Is DropTask really free?
   Yes! In the future we plan to offer paid-for business
   accounts and premium individual accounts 
   (each with additional features), however the basic  
   version of DropTask will remain free.

Founder at DropTask here. Thanks for your comments, we'll give them some thought.

In terms of how we will survive, as Ygg2 has posted from our FAQ, we plan on charging for premium features and business accounts which will offer team administration/reporting, etc. In the meantime, we are well funded :-)

I like this concept, and I think it can be improved through some more experimenting with the UI.

Here's my feedback: from an interface perspective a visual process for organizing tasks is very appealing. But things weren't as intuitive as Trello. For example: clicking a task didn't let me edit its name; it brought up a window. Clicking "new task" was my first step, when really, I have a list of groups I want to create (like in Trello)

Speed is really crucial for me in using a system like this.

Thanks for your comments. Some kind of 'quick-add' for tasks and groups is definitely something we are considering.

This might be a bug, or not. If I have 2 groups with different colors and put one inside the other, the inner group changes color. Did not expect this behavior.

> This might be a bug, or not. If I have 2 groups with different colors and put one inside the other, the inner group changes color. Did not expect this behavior.

This is by design - we simply could not get the visuals to look at all decent with mixed colours for nested groups. The idea is that the one colour applies for the entire category.

Ok, that's fine!

Thanks for the clearification.

Be careful to not get caught up in making something too pretty. It might help get some initial sign ups, but people will leave quickly if the app is not useful.

This looks like a great alternative to Trello. I'd also add the option to have bullseye nested circles to indicate priority. Typically there are fewer high priority items than low, and this metaphor should support that use case. It also helps coax the user that attending to high priority tasks is like hitting a bullseye.

It looks really good, and seems very simple and intuitive. You should add Polls or ramifications or both. Imagine if there are 3 options to make a task. You should be able to show those three options, and let the people vote on the one that should be made. Just a thought. Good luck.

This is nice but miss a way to order tasks and groups (using priority for example). Would be also nice to relate groups to each others with a link (arrow something) to organise your project diagram. Finally the print doesn't work. If you cannot print to provide an overview of all the tasks of the project then this tool is less useful for me as I would like to bring my task split to a meeting room without an internet connection for example. It would be nice to print only a sub selection as well (only the selected groups). Anyway I like the zoom an unzoom functionality that provide a quick way to have an overview of the tasks.

Just one thing:

make your modals close on the click action for the actual close button on the modal. Right now, you can dismiss the "edit task" modal by clicking outside of it. This causes you to lose any work done inside said modal via misclick.

Thanks for this. I personally like just clicking off to dismiss the modal, but admittedly if we keep this we need to be a bit cleverer in terms of not just losing the changes.

I don't really like curved text, that is just hard to read.

While more such project management tools are undoubtedly a good thing, I'd much prefer to have one I can host myself for corporate use (for security/confidentiality/hacking on it).

I'm going to try this for a while since it was easy to start using it with my Google apps domain. Within the first few minutes it has become clear that I need a way to convert a task into a group. I find myself wanting to express task dependencies by dragging things into each other but I can't drag a task onto another task. Annoying.

Edit: Also, a visual indicator of task progress, or more intermediate states (blocked, started, in progress, etc) would be helpful too.

Edit 2: And I've hit an arbitrary three project limit. So much for dumping my task list into this thing. Evaluation concluded.

Does it have dependencies? Team management can't work, in my opinion, if you have a task named "fold shirts" but it appears and is assigned before somebody "buys shirts".

This is the real nut to crack with project management.

> Does it have dependencies?

Not as yet, but this is an early release of the product and we are aggressively adding new features and improvements. This is definitely something we are considering.

This is visually very interesting. You can tell that there is a lot of care being put into the transitions and all. It's a pretty competitive market out there in terms of "to do lists". With a good UI, it gives you a fighting chance. Sure it might not be for everyone, but that's the point. Segment the market and fight for your share.

How did you find backbone and D3. Do they play well together in terms of overall code maintainability? What worked and what didn't?

Would a directed graph metaphor add to this? If task circles could be linked in order of precedence, and project circles linked to show resource collaboration, the resulting diagram layout could be visually useful.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Dir...

So far it beats Trello on the one issue that bugs me most. When I complete something it actually goes away instead of sitting there forever.

OK so I don't think I would say, replace Trello right now, but this is really neat service, well done.

I especially like how things are visual and how you can zoom in and out and see this as potentially very useful feature. I will continue to review it and use it.

Also, describing it as Trello killer, I think made us expect way too much of it. So this might not worked the way it was intended.

It would be interesting if there is a study that comprehensively measures if these pretty tools actually improves productivity in comparison to using simple text editors.

My guess is they don't. My guess is people might find them fancy and pretty initially but eventually recognize that they don't actually improve efficiency or effectiveness.

My guess is that making it really easy to move things between lists, easier than dd and p in vim, makes it more likely for people to actually update the list(s) than if it were just a text file.

You probably also advocate using shared folders to collaborate on code development too? Those darn kids and their 'innovations' ...

Make no mistake, I'm not against real innovations. For example, I've been using git and advocating for it, while many of my peers are still with older CVS systems.

The point is if you masquerade a solution to a non-problem with pretty things, it just wastes everyone's time and energy.

Like I said, it would be interesting if there is a study to find out if any of these pretty task management tools actually increases productivity.

Did you wait for a study before you switched to git? Or did you simply start using it cause it made sense?

Let's be realistic here ...

It's a cool looking alternative. But functionally I know it doesn't really meet my needs. The circles make the calendar view somewhat confusing to look at and I'm not a big fan of not being able to look at my tasks in order that they have to be completed within an individual group.

Cool idea just not very useful for me personally.

I like everything except the circles and how I had to drag drop before I can create a task. Droptask should also make a card wall layout and make the circles optional. The circles layout is too polarizing an interface to be the "muse".

This looks like a headache to work with. Wasn't a fan and didnt have enough value to try and test out. Will keep on radar but doesnt look promising or a decent replacement to trello

Interesting tool though right now in our company we use Symphonical.com a lot as it is well integrated with Google+ Hangout and has useful templates to organize and share tasks.

Wow. It's SO beautiful! And I love the care you took to show me how to use it.

I have no idea if I'll continue use it on a daily basis (Trello for now), but it's fun, and pretty.

Well done, and thank you!

Thanks for your comments - much appreciated!

Impressive. It's nice to see alternatives out there.

What's the stack behind this? Very nice by the way!

> What's the stack behind this? Very nice by the way!

The entire app is written in CoffeScript - we're using Node.js on the backend and the front is mainly SVG/D3.js/Backbone.js.

Thanks!

Will there ever be time tracking? That's one feature I really wish Trello had by default.

> Will there ever be time tracking? That's one feature I really wish Trello had by default.

We are currently considering all feature requests and this is one I've heard a few times. As such, it is definitely something we will consider!

Nice UI! I will give it a try.

Boring round lists of tasks.

Is their a twitter bootstrap style thing for web apps? Something to make the layout and buttons easier to get just right?

Um, isn't Twitter Bootstrap a "twitter bootstrap style thing for web apps"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com