Developing a Better Trello
Trello
Trello is a flexible, visual management tool that helps individuals work more efficiently and teams work more collaboratively. With millions of users, Trello is mindful of keeping its product timely and relevant, with new features added deliberately and communicated thoroughly to users.
My role was to advocate for developers and improve their workflows and experience by proposing enhancements to current functionality as well as introducing new functionality to improve Trello's effectiveness for software developers.
The Challenge
While Trello is an excellent project management tool for casual use in small teams, when it came down to business most professional software development teams preferred using a tool called Jira, Trello's big brother. Trello's purpose and overall structure is very similar to that of Jira, it just lacks some of Jira's powerful tools designed specifically for development teams. Trello, being free of cost, offers users some of these tools in the form of "power-ups" but limits user to one "power-up" at a time.
The Solution
Implementing new features that would both provide substantial benefit to development teams as well as Trello's more casual user base who use the tool to organize projects in their personal lives.
Methods: Cognitive Walkthrough, Contextual Research, Field study, Affinity Diagraming, Prototyping
Tools: Sketch, Invision, Illustrator, Post-it Notes, Trello,
“Jira is Trello on steroids”
Research
Research began with observing how Prime Academy's software development student's environment, processes and workflows effected how they used Trello and other project management tools. The results varied, some students loved using it, organizing their groups activities on Trello; while other students didn't seem to see the point in using it, preferring to simply communicate with a white board or verbally. This seemed inconvenient considering they often worked in different locations at Prime, and lots of the work would be done after class at their homes. It seemed like an online task management system would have been ideal for these students.
Research was then conducted at Dealer Teamwork, a software company located in Eden Prarie, to observe how there highly acclaimed software development team used project management tools for their work. The company employed many different tools such as Jira, Confluence, Bit.Bucket, Google Suite and Slack. Jira was the tool most similar to Trello so this was an opportunity to see what exactly a highly skilled team of professional enjoys about Jira. Powerful developer centric tools, such as burndown charts, dedicated bug tracking software, and its ability to be linked to all of their other tools were Jira's most popular features. These features are all present, in some form or another, in Trello- just in the form of "power-ups".
Design
To make Trello more useful to software developers, designing features that reflected and simplified activities performed routinely by developers was paramount. Having observed developers in the wild and performed some contextual inquires I determined two activities that could be implemented into Trello that would benefit both software developers, and Trello's more casual users.
Incorporating the "Stand Up"
A process where each team member informs the rest of the team the specific tasks he/she will be performing that day in a round table meeting.
Tracking and Resolving Issues (Bug Tracking)
The bigger the project, the more issues that occur, tracking issues (bugs) was one of the most important tasks performed by development teams.
Using Nachos (Trello's comprehensive guide to their branded design and layout) prototypes were designed that incorporated these new features while adhering to Trello's current design. These new features included:
Creating a "user status" which essentially works like a "stand up" informing teammates what tasks each member will be working on that day.
Creating a system of tagging and tracking issues that occur during the course of a project.
Conclusion
For a free to use project management system, Trello is an extremely useful tool for software developers and the casual ever day user. Being "Jira light" might not be as bad a thing as it sounds. Jira is such a powerful tool that it is is very difficult to use for the more casual user, which is where Trello shines. By incorporating the prototypes suggested Trello will become an even more powerful tool especially for software developers.
P.S
An Invision walkthrough detailing the new features even further can be found here...