TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

Peter, AKA Topper, has been working away like a Golden God (his words not mine) on getting our latest new feature for TeamworkPM out the door. It is of course the ability to assigning tasks to multiple people.

I must take my hat off to him as it's looking pretty bloody sweet at this stage. I have just been in his office checking out how it looks and and how it's working.In fairness when he has his moments he's good ;-) it is a savage piece of work. Between Peter and Dan fighting it out they have done an amazing job in keeping this feature really simple and easy to use and I have to say I can't wait for this feature to launch as It's something I have needed myself loads when working on projects.

Below is a screen shot I stole off Peter's computer a few minutes ago when he had his back turned. It's just a quick shot of where the new feature is going to appear on the task screen.

Peter wanted to be the first to post up screen shots of his work but I couldn't resist beating him to it :-)
He has a load more screen shots that he will be posting up along with a nice detailed blog post here, in the engine room blog, in which he will outline how this feature works and looks. Hopefully his post will be up over the weekend for you all to read.

Until then enjoy my stolen pic.

Hey All! Thanks for all your great feedback on Twitter (@teamworkpm) and via email, I really appreciate people giving valuable feedback.

So, what have I learned?

• Details matter.
• When tasks are sorted by Due Date, the task is the important bit, the task list is secondary
• When tasks are sorted by Project, the task list is more relevant
• I'm not right all the time ;-)

I have been thinking about this non-stop all night. Peter liked my final version late last night. I liked it late last night but something in the back of my mind wasn't 100% confident that the final direction was the right one. People's feedback indicated that there was more work to be done.

Before I tuck into a massive Easter Feast, I decided to update my work last night taking the feedback into consideration and this is the result:

• If you sort by Project, you now get the view I decided on last night
• If you sort by Date, you get an improved view of version 2 that I threw away last night.

Sort By Project

Sort By Date

You'll also notice that Peter (after we discussed the issue last night) has made a great job of improving the aesthetics of the task listing view. The person responsible is moved to the end now and not BOLD so the tasks are easier to digest and look neater. There is another very good reason for doing this, assigning to multiple people. Once we are finished, you will see "You & 3 more" or "4 people...." and we needed to refactor the listing so we can move in that direction. It will be a thing of beauty!

Once we are 100% happy and the feature is live, we'll do a nice blog post on the main blog on the new changes. This blog (Engine Room) is a great sounding board and is a more personal blog than the formal blog.

Happy Easter Everybody! We like 2 kinds of presents: Easter Eggs and iPad's ;-)

Dan.

For ages and ages I have been meaning to fix up the Everything -> All Active Tasks page. To my surprise, it seems that this page is VERY important to people, it's pretty much the only page Fiona (our graphic designer) uses. I prefer to look at the Dashboard activity and work on my late and upcoming tasks. I might use this page more now ;-)

First, I started by fixing a bug we had. Tasks that were associated with Task Lists which in turn were associated with Milestones showed on the Everything page as no due date!

Second, I wanted to make this page more like a check list of what needs to be done. I always have an A4 Pad next to me when I'm working so as I was sitting back contemplating how I can make it friendly looking, I thought "How about an A4 pad type listing"

Here's what it looked like before I started:

You can see how boring this page is. There was no real distinction between the Projects and the Task lists.

After a few cups of coffee and a quick drive in town to help out a friend, this is what I came up with.

This was getting close and I tweaked the colours a 1000 times. I even contemplated scanning in my A4 pad ;-)

The problem I had with the above is:

1. It was a 3 column layout that cramped the data on small screens
2. It was hard to associate the tasks with the task lists
3. The project and task list name kinda merge together and it's not as user friendly as I wanted.
4. Long project names + Long Task List Names = Messy Screen

It's 23.53pm now and this is where I'm at. I'm getting happy with the layout now.

I like this because:

1. The project stands out even though there is less emphasis on it.
2. The task list is now an integral part of the task display and the indentation clearly makes it apparent that the tasks are part of that list.

That's it for now. All going well, you'll see the updates in the next live version of the software.

Dan.