Swimlanes for Trello

Swimlanes for Trello(bluecatreports.com)

75 points by robinwarren 4 years ago | 35 comments

n8cpdx 4 years ago |

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.

zze 4 years ago | |

For semi-structured cards, try kanbantool.com - it does not require you to follow kanban method, allows for great customization of cards, and even has an extensive SDK (https://kanbantool.com/developer/sdk) which you can use to easily tinker with the board.

subpixel 4 years ago | |

I tried a bunch of alternatives and wound up paying for premium Trello or whatever it's called for the family. Set it up thusly:

- an iOS widget that makes capturing things super fast and easy

- an INBOX board where cards land, with lists that are auto-populated by card label

- a button to move a card to a THIS WEEK board that has lists for each day of the week

- a button to send a card back if it ain't happening this week

- a timeline view that is the reason we pay the insane price, but which is indeed very useful

I think it's worth the single-person license. I don't think it's worth that for every user, and may downgrade at the end of my annual license.

I hope they don't muck it up with feature creep, but the polish they have put on Trello is quite nice.

Schinken_ 4 years ago | |

I've been quite pleased with Planka https://github.com/plankanban/planka Though I haven't actually tried many alternatives.

davidashe 4 years ago |

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.

Steltek 4 years ago | |

While I haven't tried these swim lanes (or Trello since acquisition), I agree with you. Trello was about simplicity and being the anti-Jira. I don't see swimlanes as an absolute must-have that's in keeping with how Trello was built.

I think there will always be a group praising the addition of features. That's how all Enterprise software gets to be the way it is. Every "I won't buy it because I need $checkbox_feature" begets a meeting between sales and engineering to see how fast it could be implemented.

ed 4 years ago | |

This is a 3rd-party add-on, not a native Trello feature.

davidashe 4 years ago | | |

right, good call

musicale 4 years ago | |

> JIRA-ification

(Noun, cf. JIRA) A process of systematically degrading a software system, e.g. in an attempt to monetize it.

jonpurdy 4 years ago |

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

twobitshifter 4 years ago |

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.

m_mueller 4 years ago | |

How do you decide what gets placed on a specific Kanban board? In our Jira setup we use for scrum we basically have kanban boards per team (1 team = 1 jira project) for daily work in between sprint plannings. That means we basically have everything on there and swim lanes are helpful to keep track on what needs to get discussed in dailies (unassigned, high prio and not yet groomed, in progress or review and assigned to team -> Today lane; then we just have current sprint lane and everything else lane).

twobitshifter 4 years ago | | |

For your workflow usually unassigned, to groom, in progress, review, done would be separate columns and the priority would be mapped to the order of the cards in the column.

In order of work assignment, traditional kanban is that when a person completes a task they then take the top card and work on that.

micheljansen 4 years ago |

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

sieabahlpark 4 years ago | |

Now you can subject yourself to terrible billing from Atlassian

Ron1999 4 years ago |

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.

robinwarren 4 years ago | |

I think this was a deliberate move from the Trello team not to implement this. They were very much focussed on the "not developers" market and didn't want to implement features which were mostly only of interest to a developer audience. It seemed to work quite well for them commercially :)

jonpurdy 4 years ago | | |

I think swimlanes is a feature that benefits everybody, not just developers. At a most basic level, swimlanes by assignee would be crucial for a family board (as opposed to coloured cards by assignee, since colours could be used for category of task, etc.).

So I used Trello at home, and Jira at work. I loved how fast Trello was (despite being Electron); it’s still probably the fastest Electron/web app.

But the lack of swimlanes pushed me to Favro, which was too slow to enjoy using. When Atlassian bought Trello I figured that swimlanes would never arrive, since they wouldn’t want to eat into Jira features and market share (which i disagree with, but I digress).

As a result I use Trello casually and for simple projects with my wife, but didn’t go all-in on it. I’ll give this Power Up a try though!

XCSme 4 years ago |

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

robinwarren 4 years ago | |

Trello don't allow any more fine grained access than this. Power-ups can request view and write access and that is about it. No way to say we only want access to the current board or etc. Or that we only want to be able to update labels/members but not add comments.

They have been talking about changing that, but I understand it is complex and never really becomes a priority

dazbradbury 4 years ago | |

It does seem that the trade-off generally between handing a 3rd party access to content vs. improved functionality provided by plugins is rarely worth it. This not only applies to Trello but many other work/productivity tooling where the content is generally sensitive - eg. Slack, Trello, Gmail etc.

I'd be curious to know how many people work at companies that allow 3rd party plug-ins for these kinds of tools.

mab122 4 years ago |

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

Spivak 4 years ago | |

Wekan is wild, it's a great project but it's downfall used to be that it was a worse version of Trello. But now that Atlassian has atlassianed all over it Wekan is now "Trello back when it was still good." It's a joy to use.

KennyBlanken 4 years ago | |

Kanboard has had swim lanes for years, too.

Msw242 4 years ago |

Why this over like... Even notion?

bayindirh 4 years ago | |

Because it's old (over 10 years old), works well, battle tested and practical.

Trello allows for great collaboration and informal planning, even for daily life and for a single person. It allows capturing great deal of information under a card and showing a great deal of information without overloading your senses.

So, in short, "It works (TM)", and works well.

Spivak 4 years ago | | |

If those are your pros for Trello then you probably would love Notion. Cards are just pages which can capture anything.

adwww 4 years ago | |

Isn't it the other way around - Trello has been around and used for informal project planning for years before Notion became trendy.

ChildOfChaos 4 years ago | |

I hate notion, it's really for documents.

Trello is much better for lists and Kanban boards. The UI just works a lot better than Notion which is just a mess and ugly for such uses.

paul1664 4 years ago | |

Not everyone Notions. For everyone else... Jira.

lukasb 4 years ago | |

UX feels better - Trello is faster and more lightweight than Notion.

nhance 4 years ago |

Very curious what the path to revenue looks like for this

robinwarren 4 years ago | |

The plan at the moment is to use this as a lead magnet for our main (paid) tool https://www.bluecatreports.com/

But, possibly we will discover some need for features we could add to a paid version of this in future.