critique: tadalist
Posted by jonathan - 09/02/08 at 09:02:13 am
While I love 37 signals articles and their strong display of the KISS principle, I can’t help but think that these marketing savvy and self-describe usability experts are given a pass when people evaluate their software. Exhibiting the corporate spin-mastery that is rarely exhibited but exemplified by companies such as apple and google, they have deftly applied marketing, message and pr to dance the cha-cha around issues which which would trip up less skilled companies. As people fondle a product, how do you transform beyond KISS and move into KIMACS, Keep it minimal and complete stupid.
The company chatter mill was discussing the recent blog-talk about the relatively low line count of tadalist. I’m not sure how one can disregard the framework line count and the years of other work which resulted in the RoR framework. Lets take a look at where this task management software is failing me, and ript it a bit.
First off the design seems to follow the personal shit/task list management style of clearing your lists proposed by management self help gurus such as David Allan
Figure 1. - My personal list.
This is a mix of people to call, crap to fix around the house etc. Hmm it quickly grew to around 20 items and seems to hover in this state no matter my relative mix of sitting my fat ass on the couch vs getting jacked up on coffee and “getting things done”.
So in this perpetual state of 20 items, the add another item link (btw, links are for navigation, buttons are for actions, but that is another point), is redonkulously placed in the middle of my list serving as the dividing line between stuff to do and stuff thats done. To rectify this problem I might throw the add link at the top instead. Maybe I’d put it at the bottom of the page, at least I’d be able to ctrl+end to get to the button. Maybe I could split the stuff to do vs stuff done lists in half, thereby pushing the bottom to the bottom, but that might invade on the google ads revenue on the right. In any case the last place the link belongs is in the middle. Finally I could add a keyboard shortcut to add a new item, this might be there but I tried some Usually combo strokes and did not find anything.
Figure 2 - DoubleClick to add an item.
Next, why the hell do I click a link call “add another item” only to expose a textbox, cancel link, and a button titled “add this item”. This design paradigm has the code smell of dhtml click-trickery. If a developer in my shop did this they would face a grilling about why we would force a user to click another link to perform a primary action, adding an item. The clutter of the textbox, button and link does not need to be hidden. This type of flashiness is common for people who are just learning the artistry of dhtml. Remember, just because some browsers supported the <marquee> or <blink> tag does not mean we should have used them.
I could continue on with how the separate click into reorder mode renders the act of prioritization more annoying than I want, or how I do not understand the sorting mechanism on the main my lists page, or how this page is not reorderable, but my point in this dissection is not to catalog the design issues.
While its an admirable but questionable fact that tadalist was written with 600 lines of code, the “simplicity” of this app actually has some critical flaws. An honest evaluation of clickability, and navigation could result in no more net lines of code but a better product. As we move agile into the mainstream look out for more sophisticated methodologies to synthesize client feedback to migrate products from KISS to KIMACS.
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[…] I am going to skip over firefox and delve right into opera because firefox is even worse than ie in that ctrl+t simply gives me a blank address bar and blank page. No instructions nothing useful. Simple, yes, useful, no. In this case the KIMAC has not been met. […]
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