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Swimlanes for Trello

by robinwarren on 5/12/22, 11:54 AM with 35 comments

  • by n8cpdx on 5/12/22, 4:12 PM

    People are complaining about Trello being old. I just set one up yesterday, because I couldn’t find a good casual/flexible alternative. And no, I’m not going to set up a whole notion just to put cards on a board.

    Coming from a place of extreme prejudice against and resentment towards Trello, I actually was pleasantly surprised. Not perfect but it still works well enough and has enough features to feel powerful. It seems like they’re adding lots to it, which is maybe a mixed bag.

    I tried Microsoft Lists - it is broken in Safari (when I press the add card button, it doesn’t pop up until I interact with the user feedback widget). I tried GitHub projects but it was being weird and insists on all issues having the same columns. I tried Todoist but the story for sharing projects isn’t great for anonymous users (I need to share in a public meeting for people without accounts or desire to set them up). Microsoft Planner is offensively bad, and this is coming from a heavily biased office fanboy who secretly dreams of someday working on Outlook because I’m actually that uncool.

    So, what do the cool kids use for semi-structured cards these days?

    Edit: yes maybe Notion is the answer, trying it is on my to do list.

  • by davidashe on 5/12/22, 3:59 PM

    I thought simplicity was Trello's differentiating feature?

    I don't use Trello often, but this strikes me as the JIRA-ification of Trello being underway.

    Others don't seem to agree though.

  • by jonpurdy on 5/12/22, 4:13 PM

    I already posted below※, but I actually tried this out.

    It doesn't add swimlanes to Trello the way you'd expect. It opens up a new view which looks like Trello, but seems to be totally custom. So you can only see the swimlanes in this view, but not using Trello normally.

    Not sure if I'm missing something but this is a non-starter for me.

    ※ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31354174

  • by twobitshifter on 5/13/22, 12:41 AM

    I really think complexity subtracts from the appeal of kanban. It is easy to start with cards in 3 to 5 columns and everything after that starts messing with simplicity. Swimlanes can be harmless or they can morph many boards into a multidimensional project management puzzles. It depends. Carrie and Michael can easily have their own boards instead of being in swim lanes or you can add a lane for Carrie and Michael on every project board you create. You can go into more and more levels of this until it’s no longer helpful and a headache to manage.

    The previous Microsoft try at kanban added status on the card surface so that you had to set todo, in progress, done etc on the cards. This then created some sort of meta progress tracking. I found this to be too much when I just wanted columns tracking state.

  • by micheljansen on 5/12/22, 1:23 PM

    The lack of swimlanes was a reason for me to not use Trello before. Very nice.

  • by Ron1999 on 5/12/22, 1:24 PM

    One can only wonder why had it taken so long. it's not novel or new, just a simple usability improvement that really makes you question - Was it there from the day-1 roadmap and just wasn't implemented? Are we starting to see the decline of the extremely-poor-UX-friendly flat trend?

    glad to see a step in the right direction, hopefully 90's cloths comeback will go in the same path.

  • by XCSme on 5/12/22, 12:46 PM

    Why does it require access to all my workspaces and access to post comments as me?

  • by mab122 on 5/12/22, 1:08 PM

    So this adds swimlines like they were for a long time in https://wekan.github.io/ ?

  • by Msw242 on 5/12/22, 12:55 PM

    Why this over like... Even notion?

  • by nhance on 5/12/22, 12:53 PM

    Very curious what the path to revenue looks like for this