"Ready to pull" stories are mixed up with other stories
Hello,
The stories marked as "ready to pull" are mixed up with the stories being worked on. This is not very convenient. I guess that people tend to reorder manually to put all stories marked as "ready to pull" at the bottom.
Some tools have chosen to split each phase in two parts: one for ongoing stories and another for stories queued for next phase. They visually represent this by splitting the column horizontally or vertically.
What are the rationales behind your design choice, compared to the alternatives?
Support Staff 2 Posted by Mary on 29 Sep, 2011 03:02 PM
Hi Nicolas,
We chose not to split the phases vertically to save board space and make it easier to view your entire process. If you add an additional column per phase, it makes it much harder to see an overview of the board on most monitors. We wanted to keep the board less cluttered and simpler to read.
If you would want to put all of your 'Ready to Pull' cards at the top or at the bottom, using the arrows on each card may help. The up arrow will send the story to the top of the phase and the down will send the story to the bottom. This way you could mark a story 'Ready to Pull' and then click the down arrow to send it to the bottom of the phase to group them, this is easier than dragging the story.
Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions :)
Sincerely,
Mary
3 Posted by Nicolas Grilly on 29 Sep, 2011 03:32 PM
Hi Mary,
I understand and support the choice of not splitting columns in two. You're
perfectly right that splitting columns would make the board too large for
most monitors (including my laptop screen!).
In this case, why not automatically group all ongoing cards on top and all
"ready to pull" cards on bottom, instead of requiring the user to do it
him/herself? As an example, there is one tool called KanbanPad that does
that and the result is really nice and handy (we need a more powerful tool
like AgileZen anyway).
One related question: I've read you're working on a new user interface with
real time update. Does this user interface overhaul include a graphical
redesign of the application itself, including the board? I'm asking because
I think each card fills too much space on the board:
- maybe the borders could be more thin;
- the first line could be used for the story title and the other information
could be displayed after;
- the story ID, the assigned team member, the tags and the "ready to pull"
could be grouped on the same line.
This would make the board even more easy to read and help to focus on the
board instead of the "chrome".
I'm very curious to hear what your plans are about this. Do you provide some
screenshots in advance to collect users feedback?
Cheers,
Nicolas
Support Staff 4 Posted by Mary on 29 Sep, 2011 07:43 PM
Hi Nicolas,
We don't automatically group Ready cards because we like to allow people to use the process of their choice. For instance, we don't group our cards marked 'Ready to Pull'. Our cards are in priority order in the phase and we don't want to lose that order once marked Ready. We use the Filter 'status:ready' to group the Ready cards if needed (we normally do not have a lot of Ready cards waiting) rather than re-sorting the phase. Others may want to group all the Ready cards to the top or have all cards grouped by color, so we leave the option open to the owner of the project :)
In regards to our upcoming UI changes, since we are adding new functionality there will be some graphical changes. Thank you for the great suggestions, we appreciate your input and will share them with the developers. We are at the beginning stages so are currently working on the functionality right now more than the design, so we don't have any set plans for that yet. We will definitely take into consideration all the feedback we've received over the years and may have other ways to gain feedback, but it's too early in the process to know for certain what actions those will be.
Thanks again,
Mary
5 Posted by Dimitris Havlidis on 18 Oct, 2011 05:24 AM
I like the fact that you want to give the ability to people to choose how they organize the tasks, and by doing so not grouping ready tasks on the top but, you could make it an option on the board, it would have been very handy.