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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

>It looked a lot like a whiteboard with sticky notes translated into a web browser and an iPhone App.

That's pretty much it. It was an insanely easy idea to copy, you can already do it with sticky notes if you work in an office. I don't really think you can improve the service beyond that; It's a note tracker, it tracks notes.

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I've said this on HN before. But this is what I love about Trello - they resisted the urge to do more than just reproduce the sticky note/whiteboard experience digitally. I've used other products that could be described as "copies" that tried to "enhance" that experience, even slightly, with additional functionality that ended up detracting from the core product. It seems like that was a harder balance to hit than it might look.

The thing is that it is so limited, that you'll move away from it sooner or later when you need more structure. I've used it in a significant capacity in 4 teams, and we always ended up migrating to another tool, once it was clear which other tool would fit the needs of the team the best. Sure, that's good for you as user to have an early-stage playground, but probably bad for Trello.

I have to use Jira at work, and cannot tell you how much happier I'd be if we could move to Trello.

The grass is always greener. Trello is so awful as a bug/issue tracker I'd love to be using JIRA.

In Jira you can't even read the issue because half of the screen is occupied with navs or borders.

This is more or less how it looks on a full-screen Retina 15" Macbook Pro: http://pcgen.org/autobuilds/pcgen-docs/images/jira/jira_04.p...

Yet somehow every Trello clone I've used has never been as fast, intuitive or as simple as Trello. You're either fighting against a poor UI, slow animations or in some cases visible reloads when dropping cards.

If Trello is such a simple product, how are the competition failing to make their version as refined? I've never found a single competitor that has made their Kanban board feel like Trello, so until then, I'll just keep using Trello.

Yeah and everyone and their brother had built various versions of that same concept both before and after they launched theirs. But clearly they got the simple and effective part right given what happened with their userbase.

I feel that Joel was a pretty important factor in why it got so much adoption. This wasn't exactly a nobody pitching their cool new project.

Well, one idea would be to track the state of the thing it represents. Fix a bug, move it to done. But afaict, they prefer not imposing a particular workflow on anyone. As a result, moving a card to 'Done' doesn't affect the due date coloring. So you have to move the card and click a button.

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