Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanbrunner | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com