Nozbe: Quite a few more thoughts

More impressions of Nozbe, the newest online "Getting Things Done" (GTD) application.

Posted on 2007-02-13 23:42 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]

What is 'GTD'?

GTD stands for "Getting Things Done", and is a "work-life management system" and a book by David Allen.

Get the book here, while also helping me out (affiliate link)

Other GTD resources

David Allen: What is GTD?

43 Folders: Getting started with ‘Getting Things Done’

Tracks is a free GTD web app written in Ruby on Rails.

I’ve been using Nozbe for a few small projects, and somehow it manages to get out of my way and let me just dive right in and plan and do stuff in a way that few of the other apps have been able to do.

In other words, I dig Nozbe so far.

Nozbe’s five projects limit

It’s a bit hard knowing how it’ll scale if all my projects and next actions are dumped in there. And it looks like the big dump won’t happen tonight, at least, even though the voices begging for more projects are many (ten at the time of writing this). There’s been no word on that from developer Michael Sliwinski, which I suspect might mean one of several things:

I can’t think of any reason why it should be the second of those two, and if it was the last one, I can’t think of a reason why he hasn’t replied to the thread of ten people saying the same thing.

Here comes the crowd, or: “Oh no, not again”

With the launch of any application for Getting Things Done, there comes an onslaught of people requiring all sorts of obscure features that them and five others might find a use for.

“Make your app do this, and I’ll dump every other application in favor of yours.” Hah! More likely it’s going to be: “Make your app do this, and I’ll be well on my way through the third app after yours, requesting even more obscure features.”

Nozbe is not an exception. There’s one, for example, in the same forum thread I linked to above, with this idea:

“Would love to see an ability to enter the amount of time taken on a task, so that we could see if our time estimates are accurate, and then show a percentage over or under. Better yet, include a timer.”

All right, it’s just an idea, but as such it would belong in another thread, not in a “this is a serious showstopper for us” thread. And I’m using this just as an example of the myriad requests of the same kind. So it’s not that I don’t think it would be nifty, and it’s not a personal attack on the contributer in any way.

But somehow, with all the other features already in the works, and also trying to minimize feature creep and keeping things simple, I don’t think these kinds of features are the first to be implemented. And if it were to be implemented at some point, I have a suspicion it would be one of those features that got in the way and made you fiddle with the application instead of Getting Things Done.

Helping developers out

I think what developers in general, and in case of Nozbe, Michael Sliwinski, first and foremost could use would be feedback about what is and isn’t working with the current feature set and design.

How does it work for you, as it is now? What’s easy? What’s hard? What’s intuitive, and what’s incomprehensible?

There are a number of things I have noted just after using Nozbe a little bit the past couple of days, which I hereby present to you.

And yes, I will be suggesting a few features along the way, but they will be things that will make Nozbe get more out of my way in favor of — I suspect you guessed it — Getting Things Done.

Front page

I have 3 next actions! But what are they? I expect to Nozbe to give me something I can do immediately, not make me click one extra time.

Even better: Make me select different contexts for different computers (a la TaskToy). I have one at work, one at home and a laptop, and some contexts are irrelevant at some of them.

I don’t need the Nozbe blog stuff to the right. Lose that, and put my active projects there instead, like on the Projects and Next Actions pages.

I want one-click access to creating new projects or new next actions in existing projects. Make getting things off your brain as fast and hassle free as possible.

All in all, as it is now, the front page isn’t utilized at all, while I would expect it to give me a very useful overview.

Projects page

The same is true for the Projects page — the front page isn’t really used for anything. Why not give me a list of projects and their next actions, and let me add actions directly to projects from there?

Next Actions page

This page is pretty okay, actually, so I’ll use this space to say a bit more about Nozbe’s design and layout.

I think it’s a bit space consuming vertically. List items are too tall, and the icons along the top could just as well be down along the left side, which isn’t used for anything at all anyway. That would allow for more visible list items at a time. Most monitors are wider than they are tall …

Other things

As a personal preference and a minor detail, I don’t like the buttons for creating new things. Or, rather, I don’t like their placement/spacing. They look slapped on haphazardly the way they’re placed. Maybe they could be placed to the right in the heading (on the green stripe)?

Also, what’s up with the popup Javascript warning at some point during the night? All it does is block my window. I’ll reload it myself, thank you. Or at least wait with the popup until I return to my machine in the morning and try to do something in Nozbe for the first time. I have never, ever encountered a web application that does this, and I think there’s a good reason why.

Conclusion

Fix these things, and I’m yours, Michael.

Oh, and let me add more projects!

Seriously, though, keep up the good work, and implement the important stuff first. As I said in my first post about Nozbe, you have done something right that few others have managed, although I’m still not able to put my finger on exactly what that is ...

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