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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

It definitely has all the trappings of a Fog Creek app: - The overall UI: built by programmers who dabble in design - A seven(!) minute video about how _simple_ it is to use. It's easy! Instead of just raising your hand, you mark a light on the corresponding tote board, which informs your manager that you need more information.

I hate to be contrarian, but there are many other apps out there that solve this problem much more succinctly. I'm not sure who thought a solution like this is needed.

Also: "lemmur"

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Harumph, grouchy pants. Well, one of the designer/UI peeps at 37signals liked it! so there! http://twitter.com/#!/rjs/status/113751685091950592

But in typical usenet style, I will engage each of your points directly and anxiously await your rebuttal.

- "The UI stinks." I think this is the number one thing we've gotten praise for. It's hard to please everyone, but overwhelmingly people have told us the opposite of what you are saying.

- "The video is too long / The app isn't simple enough." I sort of agree with this. The video is kind of long for an app this simple. I got a bit bored in the middle (and I'm the Fog Creek co-founder). But if you wait until the Jello line at the end, it's totally worth it!

- "People already solved this problem." Right and wrong. I think there are a few other solutions which are pretty close to this idea (some of them are even posted here in the comments, and we've since discovered more as people tweeted them to us) but I think we'll get more traction because we aren't building a software dev tool. We're trying to build a horizontal tool, and our future releases will reflect that focus. The majority of the existing tools are aimed at developers.

- "Joel pronounces lemur incorrectly." I'm pretty sure he did that just to annoy you. It apparently succeeded.

"The UI stinks", but I like idea and functionality behind. Just like online group sticky note board I'd like to use

No rebuttal here! Thanks very much for the clarification.

If you're getting praise for the UI, go for it. I think my biggest issue is the relatively narrow nature of the design. The cards, the columns, etc. Example: http://cl.ly/1i01452a3l0V1X3K3N1f -- line breaks like that are difficult on the eyeballs.

Little things, like using color-coded labels for organization sound good on paper, but are very tedious in practice. Lots of calendars use this with good intentions, but you'll find yourself asking, "is that a grey, or taupe task?"

Walking the user through the on-boarding process would help immensely in describing the product. Right now, there's a bit of information overload with everything being visible on the screen. It'd be neat to see an approach where you're presented with nothing, and are told to "create a list. Great! Now add yourself to this list. Wonderful! Lists are used for X, Y, Z"

I do apologize for being so gruff in my original comment. If you're getting great feedback on Trello, there's obviously something there. Good luck with it!

Agree on line breaks. And also on labels.

RE: onboarding, we want to do something like we did with webputty.net using Optimizely's Guider https://github.com/jeff-optimizely/Guiders-JS

As someone who's used FogBugz and Kiln for some time, and has just played around with Trello, I'd say this:

FogBugz definitely suffers from what you describe. Despite what Fog Creek might say about it being easy, it feels clunky and indirect. And slow -- it's 2011, yet everything that manipulates the case table (arguably the most important part of the app) seems to require a full page refresh. It definitely suffers from the "you must mold your brain into our mindset to use" mentality. Furthermore, it's languishing -- most of the updates release to the On Demand version in the past year feel like small tweaks, many related to Kiln. Where's the leadership?

Kiln, on the other hand, is excellent. No problems whatsoever. Does what it's supposed to and does it well. No friction.

Now, Trello. I've only used it for a few hours, but already I look forward to using it for as many projects as I can. Simply amazing and simple and intuitive, all at the same time. It has negative friction -- practically invites me to put everything I have on it. I don't know what Fog Creek's doing in regards to product design, but it's working.

(And granted, most of those FogBugz problems could simply be because of a hefty anchor of legacy code. Maybe FC has simply moved on entirely)

Insightful points. Thanks for the background.

Stay tuned for some significant changes to address much of what you've said about FogBugz here. Definitely not moved on. Just going to show it all to you at once.

OK, but can you give us some specific improvements you'd make? Or parts of the design that you'd change?

Sure, I do have a contracting fee for such occasions :)

Wow. So your pitch is "Your app sucks. Give me $1k and I'll tell you why"? Does this ever actually work?

Wow, tough crowd. It was a joke. No more bad jokes on HN. Got it.

Oh wow! What a coincidence! I have a downvote for jackasses.

I would say change the colors. They're as fresh as Windows software from the 90's.

The typography is rather ugly and makes the UI look stuffed (so maybe tuning the font, font-weights and font-sizes would help)

Overall the UI looks stuffed and heavy and colors make it seem depressing. The actual task something like two words, but about half of the space is occupied with heavy indicators of comments or other UI elements, so you tend to focus on the UI and not the actual information.

I guess the UI works in the basic level, but it's not that well or tastefully executed, and definitely looks like coder design.

Where is the delete/remove button?

"...but there are many other apps out there that solve this problem much more succinctly."

Links please.

What Trello accomplishes could also be accomplished in Campfire without needing to keep a browser window open. There's also Yammer, to some degree.

Obviously Trello's approach is different, but my point was there are other apps that have simpler approaches to the same problem.

http://agilezen.com/ is very close, and actually has a bunch of other useful features too. Although I've got to say that trello is a lot slicker than agilezen.

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