Why is Trello so addictive?
UX design for human experience
Technology should inspire us to design products and services that enable positive experiences, the line between these physical and digital touchpoint’s are full of opportunity and all too often we only pick the low hanging fruit available to us -surface solutions that do never address our deeper needs.
In a previous post I explored if we would ever replace paper and argued the possible future of screens by using perhaps one of the more human tasks I could think of as an example, this was organisation and to-do lists. I argued that the connection of writing your to-do’s out on paper holds a greater power than having them available on a screen and I still stand by this, paper will always provide a more flexible and personal feeling. However, after experimenting with Trello over the last few weeks it’s experience is starting to come pretty damn close to what I want.
Trello is an online collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello is supposed to be able to tell you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.
Trello is organized around a “kanban board” concept. Kanban was a system for lean manufacturing that Toyota popularized in the 1940s. The basic idea was that each “card” represented a product, part, or inventory. When a card moved around a board, it meant that something had been physically moved from a supplier to a factory. — Hiten Shah
A kanban board suggests you organise your tasks around what there is to do, that is being done and what has been completed. Imagine a digital whiteboard that is able to scroll horizontally, with this system your tasks could be ordered into the above suggestion of to-do, doing and done as simply as moving physical sticky notes across sections but with the addition of each of these notes being able to contain photos, data and even separate checklists.
At first I was pretty sceptical, I mean I have tried plenty of digital and physical platforms and systems to try and organise myself — I recently attempted to keep a bullet journal which lasted around 100+ days but couldnt keep up with spontaneous activities or missed days so I reverted, once again, back to post-it notes.
Trello is addictive. Maybe I’m a geek about how organised I want to be but I may have possibly found a digital solution to organisation that is as satisfying as paper. Its experience so far is a quaint balance between physical movement and digital micro-interactions that mimic them. The platform feels natural and is suitable for adaptive or responsive workflows without forcing me to change how I would like to organise my own tasks. I haven’t yet figured out the perfect way to do so but this is half the fun, Trello is actively opening knowledge gaps so I can explore the service to fill them — it’s a self-learning hook and trigger.
This isn’t where all of my satisfaction is coming from though, plenty of platforms offer a kanban board style service which is paired with real-life micro-interactions. The added features such as labels offer a great insight into how unique each individual board can be. These labels provide a snapshot into each task without having to open it up to check it’s status and I’m looking forward to some larger projects to grow to see how I can use Trello around them.
Technology should inspire us to design products and services that enable positive experiences but for the most part, these positive experience will come when digital services enable physical experiences. Trello is addictive because it does just this, it uses its digital platform to find joy in organisation — it’s the smart mimic of physical interactions that make it so enjoyable and allows users to find their own system of organisation.
Organisation is one of the more human tasks we could ever begin to explore as there must be room for flexibility, mistakes, success and so much more. So far, paper and post-it notes have allowed this. Just think of the emotional power screwing up a piece of paper and chucking it away gives you, or ticking that last box on your to-do list, or even finding an old stash of to-do lists that you shouldn’t have kept but you did. Trello has recreated these human experiences, it plays on the subtle emotions and interactions we want to feel by mimicking them on screen — that old pile of to-do lists just became an old project board on Trello.
Trello has found a great space to operate in for the foreseeable future, it allows individuals and teams to organise their daily lives — it enables them to find positive experiences in their work and although Trello is screen based I believe it does a great job at unpacking the screen to allow these types of experiences. Trello is addictive, it has me genuinely excited about how far I can take it but only for now.
Thanks for reading — I’m currently a user experience intern at Bosch Power Tools and an Industrial Design student at Loughborough University. Feel free to get in touch or check out my website.
