Trello hits 12M users, launches Power-Ups platform(venturebeat.com) |
Trello hits 12M users, launches Power-Ups platform(venturebeat.com) |
While you can try some hacky alternatives in a browser, they are a pain, confusing and a poor workaround. On mobile you are completely screwed, unless you want to log out and log back in each time you want to switch accounts. (You do have a long cryptic passphrase which makes this even worse?)
Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right. Why does no one seem to learn? (Yes, Dropbox I am looking at you too.)
I really hope that was a joke on your part. If there is one thing that was irritating it was how google would mix up and connect various accounts at random for no particular reason.
My main frustration is services that don't even get close to Google's implementation and user experience for multiple accounts, despite it serving as an example for many years. Like Trello, most seem to not even bother, while others like Dropbox seemed to do the worst combination of things possible.
I understand it's difficult to do, but if you're a service that encourages it's use across work and personal life, you eventually need a way to manage people separating that.
Perhaps they can have the concept of you always have a personal account, and you get /invited/ into an organisation? As apposed to Google's approach of having seperate, distinct accounts and you can 'easily' switch between them.
I'd also add to the list of grievances that Trello has yet to have a multi-select / multi-edit feature, something I see has been asked for over 3 years ago.
1. The search is awful. I won't really elaborate on this except to say it's often really hard to find stuff and if they did some UX research on this I think it could be much improved.
2. I intentionally avoid opening the notifications pane except in certain moments because opening it clears the "read" status of the notifications therein. This is an issue, because I haven't necessarily read or dealt with the notification. Therefore, I only open the notifications pane when I'm in a spot where I can feasibly deal with or record every single important notification that it's going to show me, otherwise, there's the risk that the notification will go unread (in the true, real-life sense) and thus be missed entirely.
All that said, bravo Trello, you're a great product.
However, it doesn't solve the problem the mobile apps have.
However, one thing I've found helpful - Chrome's inbuilt account switcher.
You can access this by clicking on the button in the top-right - basically, you can be signed into multiple Google accounts, one per Chrome window - and they will each have their own cookies, tabs etc.
So it's a good way of keeping things segregated.
Now I am team member and can also access boards. That also means that team boards are exposed whenever and wherever I login, even if I only want to login for personal information. Some family members and friends may know my personal login, so now team information is also accessible to them.
I'll now get notifications for personal and work related activity going to the same browsers and email accounts. Are you sure work's admin really wants work information going to my personal email account? Do I want to get distracted by personal notifications during a work day and vice versa?
Now that my personal and work are intermingled, I am also more likely to make a mistake such as creating new boards/lists/cards in the "wrong" place, and it will be harder to notice. Work can't be sure that they have everything backed up.
Then a year later I leave. Somehow the work admin is going to have to figure out which user I am (remember not related to work conventions and standards), and disentangle me. Providing I have been perfect and never intermingled anything, it will be fine. The odds of that are low.
Essentially the single account has just made everything worse, to the benefit of no-one.
There are a great number of workarounds for your 'problem'.
I have two Trello accounts and have never had a problem switching between them. I have one for work and another for personal stuff, just like you suggest, and it works fantastic. If I'm logged in to one and want to check the other I just log out, enter the credentials for the other account and it works exactly like I would expect. There's no mixing at all, they're completely distinct, which is exactly how I want it, and exactly how it should be, IMO.
Google, on the other hand, is an absolute mess. At this point I've resigned myself to the fact that my work Gmail/Google+/Google/YouTube account and my personal Gmail are inextricably linked together and there's no way I can unlink them. It's such a disaster that it was a big factor in my decision to start moving my personal accounts away from Google.
So you just have to log out and re-enter credentials each time you want to view a different account? And that is fantastic? Doing it several times a day is a pain. Also you only get notifications for the currently logged in account, so you'd need multiple browsers running just to get notifications from both.
Then if you have a mobile device, it becomes even worse as entering reasonably complex passphrases is a long tedious pain. Doing that several times a day is a non-starter.
Are you able to provide any more details around this?
I wasn't even aware that was possible.
But I think the more interesting link for the HN crowd is this one:
How to build a Trello powerup: https://developers.trello.com/power-ups/samples
Sample github repo: https://github.com/trello/power-up-template
http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/
but that post is about 3 years old, so I wonder how they changed over the years....
Basecamp currently has 50 employees on LinkedIn. I'd be interested if anyone has stats for how many users they have.
They're just card-looking buttons that open up a modal dialogue, and they've been this way since the beginning. I find it rather slow or bulky compared to Google's concept of cards.
The only way it can fuck up is if it goes the Evernote way
edit: I was thinking of checklists, not cards.
When you don't have power-ups enabled, it will shorten all Github links and add a nicer format to certain types but when you do have the power-ups, it no longer shortens Github links at all but adds the octocat to the beginning.
While having power-ups can be nice, the added inconsistency is a bit off-putting. It would be great to shorten and format all of the links in the same fashion across all boards regardless of whether or not you have power-ups enabled on that particular board.
The new Power-Ups platform would definitely add more dimensions to trello.
It is so under powered. They been at it for years and still no decent SEARCH, no proper sub-tasks or dependencies, etc.
To me, it feels like there is no real active development on this.
It's not a project management tool anymore than it is a bug tracker or a crm or an applicant tracking system. People use Trello for all of those things but at its core, it is just a list of lists.
The power comes from understanding how that metaphor can help provide structure to some process that you have. (Trello comes from "trellis" - a structure to help plants grow).
Check out trello.com/inspiration for some examples. It's a bit like explaining to someone what a spreadsheet is before they have seen one and why they would use one. Once you grok it, it's very powerful.
I think of Trello these days like an orchard of ideas. I plant a few idea seeds by rapidly sketching out cards, and some will grow checklists as I copy paste bullets from notes etc. As the checklist items grow in complexity, they fall off the tree and are planted, and so on..
If you're a PMP used to Gantt charts and such, I'm sure that system sounds like some hippy dippy BS, but it works very well on a small scale with a small, mixed-discipline team.
You can do both.
http://help.trello.com/article/942-assigning-people-and-due-...
Still, I don't think I want to use Trello on my projects (I use it in some projects for customers). I can't articulate well the reasons but the general feeling is that if the project is not trivial you start having too many cards and the columns get too long and you start losing stuff. It's not for long living projects, where you need to store information that let you tell who decided what and why two years ago. It's better suited for short bursts of activity and to dispatch tasks to executors. Probably one project manager to assign tasks and developers to report on their accomplishment. It could be a good tool for that.
As an example of what it shouldn't be used for: bug tracking. We are creating cards for bugs on a project but Trello cards are not well suited for that, neither to input bug reports nor for managing them. To be fair, I bet that Trello didn't design for this use case. That someone is using it for this maybe means that it's appreciated beyond its limits.
That sucks, and causes problems. Dropbox tried it. On the organisation side, they now have to remember that user redpuppy925 is actually an org member, rather than by the organisation identity. Then the user interface would have to show their personal and org content at the same time. You really don't want that happening on their home family computer, nor would the user likely appreciate their personal content always being available at work. It ends up far easier putting the wrong items in the wrong place.
As an org admin, it should be very clear who has access to org information. And when they leave it should be very easy to revoke that access. Backups and auditing should only cover org data, not personal content.
- use different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera).
- or use different users (feature introduced in Android 5.0).
Less than ideal (e.g. opening link) but can be useful sometimes.
On iPhone maybe iOS Chrome and Safari Mobile have different cookies so can have different users?
I've also noticed small things like the avatar image I set at work becomes avatar image for my personal account.
What it considers your primary account is apparently the first one you add, so if the order is wrong, you have to sign out of all of them and start over [1].
But it's not exactly like that. Recently someone added me to a new Google Apps for Work (or whatever it's called this month) account, and now this new account is, mysteriously, the default account, even though I've had a different one for ages.
If you open Google Calendar, it will embed the account number in the URL (https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/3/render, for example), but this number obviously isn't static. If you have multiple devices and sign in elsewhere, the number might be wrong.
You also get this number as "?authuser=3" in every Google Hangout URL. But that number is yours — when people share a link like this, the recipient typically ends up opening GH for the wrong account. Google Hangouts is notoriously finicky about accounts, and the loading screen will often hang if you happen to be using the wrong one for a particular hangout ID. Sometimes GH shows the (tiny, dark gray) account switching link, sometimes not. (Hangouts is generally a disaster when it comes to actually starting one.)
[1] http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/13/set-default-google-account-mu...
I've found the best solution is to create bookmarks for GMail and Calendar with the URL like you mentioned, except you can use your email address in place of the number (that is, in stead of/b/3/ you can do /b/user@gmail.com/).
Not perfect, but I hope this helps!
You are comparing them against what they could have done. Yes, there are pieces of friction. However when compared against services that do nothing at all about multiple accounts, it is a considerable improvement!
It makes a nice separation and you don't need to worry about whether some tool you like to use has fancy multiple account tech. If the big guys like Google and Facebook can't get it right, I think it's unreasonable to expect smaller players to do better.
You never need to think about who your are logged in as or who you are posting as.
Nothing to be done though. Google is a big fish.
I've been looking at Node, Redis, PostgreSQL for my next project.