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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
[+] [-] adrianhoward|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryanbrunner|13 years ago|reply
A great example of how great UI doesn't necessarily equate to great UX, in my opinion.
[+] [-] dechols|13 years ago|reply
The circles kind of kill the whole point of a taskboard, IMO.
[+] [-] cgislason|13 years ago|reply
One thing that the circle metaphor does add is nested groups, which I can see being important for a different set of use cases.
[+] [-] cyanbane|13 years ago|reply
Note: Trello has this color representation also with editable labels, of course. For some reason I dig the circles though.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] foresterh|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jbranchaud|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgreensp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikemoka|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vineet|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Ygg2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] william_uk|13 years ago|reply
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 :-)
[+] [-] anandkulkarni|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] william_uk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrejNorling|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] william_uk|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dropdownmenu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgcosta|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoobert|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fein|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] william_uk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|13 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] bithive123|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ROFISH|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] william_uk|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teyc|13 years ago|reply
How did you find backbone and D3. Do they play well together in terms of overall code maintainability? What worked and what didn't?
[+] [-] bsg75|13 years ago|reply
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Dir...
[+] [-] ripter|13 years ago|reply