Live data from Hacker News

Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

droptask.com

21–30 of 71 posts

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#21

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 g…

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.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#22

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 g…

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.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#25
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.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#26
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.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#27
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#28
post #9

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.
Post reply on HN