Trello: Making the Most of the Home Screen

Trello

Trello is known for being a productivity powerhouse, helping individuals and teams organize their tasks and workflow using a series of boards, cards and checklists.

Team Members can collaborate in real-time, posting documents, references and comments. Tasks are assigned to specific members and can be marked as completed or moved to other boards.

The home screen is the command center and heart of any app

It’s not enough to have a successful desktop or mobile experience, but a uniform customer journey through all user needs, regardless of which device they are using. Due to the productive nature of the app, Trello needs to ensure that it’s desktop and mobile experiences make every screen count, otherwise running the risk of wasting user’s valuable time.

The Home Screen

The home screen is the command center and heart of any app and needs to provide an overview of important information while simultaneously providing shortcuts to main app functions.

The current Trello home screen, called Boards, presents user boards under overlapping headings, such as Recent, Personal and Company. This issue presented in this format is that the same board can easily show up under all three categories, wasting valuable screen space.

A more efficient user experience would be introducing the ability to collapse, hide or remove any of the overlapping sections, to improve the flow and use of the small mobile screen.

Customization options would be a great addition to the Trello tool, allowing the user to dynamically drag and drop which sections they want to show up on the homepage to most quickly get to the most important boards when users need it the most.

Usability

User experience is the fine line between design expertise and user testing to address customer needs. It is possible to design in a vacuum, but success will not be long lasting if there is not a cyclical feedback loop.

Companies who outsource user testing as a one-off experience are losing money in the long run as that data very quickly becomes out of date and unusable. Usability testing is not a one-time project and is based on completing iterations over and over again, improving, testing and implementing.

User experience is the fine line between design expertise and user testing

Focus groups and surveys allow companies to track and verify data, connecting it with any internal user data questions that have gone unanswered.

Providing Alternatives

At the end of the day, the cost of not addressing usability and accessibility features versus taking the time to understand what the user is getting out of the home screen is the difference between a company succeeding or failing.

A crowded digital market with no shortage of competitors means taking the time to consider base users and power users is more important than ever.

Accessibility is more than just offering a zoom or colorblind mode, it can refer to giving users more choice based on their particular skill-set and method of learning. The more accessible a service, the larger the number of users that will stick with a service or product, rather than leaving it for a competitor.