The New Trello

[#1]

Trello users have always used the app to organize their personal tasks and we have spent the last year thinking about how to make Trello even more useful for personal productivity.

The result of which, we've invited you to experience. So what is part of the New Trello?

Inbox - for all your incoming to-dos

Say goodbye to your to-dos scattered all over the place! The New Trello lets you snap your to-dos in one click, without ever thinking “where do I find it” or configuring “where does it need to go”. All your captured to-dos land in the Inbox. This is where you can later review, sort, filter your incoming to-dos - and organize them by moving to the right boards and to Planner.

Inbox is available across all your devices: Android, iOS, desktop apps and Web.

Get sh*t done with Planner

The new Planner in Trello connects to your calendars, shows your schedule and availability right next to your tasks (Google Calendar is supported, and Microsoft Outlook Calendar is this year).

Beautiful split screen experience (also, where are my boards?)

We’ve made it easy to navigate between Inbox (where all your new to-dos are), Boards (where you have your to-dos organized) and Planner (where you schedule the most important to-dos to get done).

Mirror Cards

Now you can have a “source of truth” card on a single board, and then a representation of that card on your to-do list. Create once - see and edit it anywhere!

Mark it "Done"

Click on web, tap on mobile - and quickly mark a thing as completed. Filter and hide them, or leave them there to celebrate how much you have accomplished today!

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

Nice new stuff, but I really hope you will consider having an option on where one activate these new features from... Adding a floating small menu at the bottom might look fancy, but the usability of it is super low having yet another place to look/move mouse to for navigation. (Break fitts law in all kind of ways: https://lawsofux.com/fittss-law/)

I could have understood it if there was no more room at the top, but there are plenty.

Also PowerUps that place a Bottom Bar will have their GUI collide with this floating bar ☹️

So hope at least get an option to choose between floating and top-left placement 🙏

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

2 Developer related Questions

1. Is the REST API already able to interact with Inbox (and Calendar) or is that not Planned/Ready?

2. Will there be PowerUp support so we as developers can add extra buttons and such in the inbox view? (for imports, triage tools etc.) 

[Alexandros Mathopoulos]

Thank your @Rasmus Wulff Jensen for all the feedback! We really appreciate it. 

On The Island Navigation - We will certainly look into the situation where the Island interferes with the Powerups. Is there a particular Powerup you have in mind that you think would interfere with the island? 

Also, thank you for the feedback on the Island placement. We have heard from some other users as well that they would prefer it in the top left corner. This is an area we are keeping an eye on and will potentially make adjustments as we get more user feedback. 

On 3rd Party Developer Support - Inbox & Planner (aka calendar) do not currently have public REST APIs or integrations with Powerups. Public REST APIs is likely something we will try and release before making these features generally available. Powerups for Inbox is a great idea! Any particular Powerup use cases you think would be super valuable in Inbox? 

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

> Specific PowerUps affected:

I'm currently developing a PowerUp that use the Boardbar (https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/trello/power-ups/ui-functions/board-bar/), and while it is not the mosted used of the PowerUp features it is being there for a reason... I never got around to testing the island and boardbar interaction when is was briefly with n the beta and now I can't get back in (sounds like getting back in are coming soon)

> PowerUp ideas for Inbox

I could see it could be cool to link various Todo lists with the inbox for easy import/export... Or move inbox items to other users via the API... Or add to multiple boards. 

Advanced views for filter and sorting of large inboxes could also be a thing I guess

(Disclaimer: I personally don't think I will use the inbox unless dedicated apps are made for mobile apps; Todo apps + integrations to Trello works better for my use-cases)

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Alexandros Mathopoulos : Now that it is possible get back into the Beta 🥳, I've tested the interaction between the new navigation island and PowerUps using the board bar power-up feature, and as expected it is not good ☹️ ... The Island lay in front of the bar, and obscuring quite a lot of the real-estate... Here is a sample screenshot

 

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

... As a sidenote/Bug-report, there seems to also be an issue with the Beta and PowerUp Buttons.

1: Not all PowerUp Buttons are shown (seems to never show more than 3 icons at most)

2: In Dark-mode, the new listing of PowerUp Board buttons in the menu, it incorrectly use Light-mode Icons instead for the the configured Dark-mode icons (like the menu-bar does)

[Alexandros Mathopoulos]

Thank you @Rasmus Wulff Jensen for the continued feedback, really appreciate it!

Only seeing the 3 powerups in the board header is a deliberate decision. If you would like to see all your powerups you can go to the board menu. The reason we made this change is to ensure that the board header does not wrap to multiple lines and created a weird UX. Do you think being able to re-arrange the order of powerups shown on a board would help? 

Good spot on the icon colors for powerups in the board menu. Trying to reproduce on our end but can not seem to. Which browser are you using? 

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Alexandros Mathopoulos 

> Hiding icons

This is really beyond me why you do this. You have a perfectly good system for choosing what PowerUps are allowed an icon in the powerup menu and there is plenty of space in the toolbar (It is actually comically empty and waste of space at the moment). I could understand if the big search-box above was in the toolbar or you used the space for something else, but instead you deny a few 22x22 pixel icons room in the toolbar and tucking away the rest in a menu that a best will cause an extra click for people who know they are there and at worst cause confusion for those who do not know.

It also make the "..." Menu slow to open as it dependent of the powerup app icons loading from 3rd party sources

Finally the "..." Menu begin to have trouble showing if you have above 8 powerup icons and you end up with a horizontal scrollbar 😱(try it)

Honestly these changes feels less and less user-friendly causing descreasing produtivity for the advanced and confusion for the casual user (aka a lose, loose situation) ☹️

>Darkmode icons:

I used Microsoft Edge but also Mobile Safari on Ipad

[Alexandros Mathopoulos]

@Rasmus Wulff Jensen Thank you for the continued feedback! Launching a Beta well before all of this is made available to all Trello users is precisely so we can get this type of feedback and adjsut where it makes sense. We are currently seeing if we can increase the number of powerups shown in the header when there is room (like in your screenshot above). We are also exploring adding a small count icon to the general powerup button in the header to indicate that there are more powerups available (in cases where we can not fit all of them in the header). 

We are also looking into the horizontal scrolling/other bugs you reported around the board menu. 

[Anant Raj]

Kinda new to Trello but loving the feature of inbox, totally perfect for capturing new tasks and ideas, just I think there would be way that other collaborators on the board could send these inbox messages to us and we would have a way to accept and reject their inbox task suggestions

[Walter Zausch]

Mark it Done! (or "in-process")

Love this new feature. Would love it even more if there was an "Mark In-process" checkmark (yellow right arrow, etc.) It would be great to add a little "Kanban-lgiht" functionality, especially with shared boards and working with others.  Maybe it's an "option-click" to mark as in-process.

Marked as "in-process," you know that it's being handled and not to start that task.

[Pascal Reischl]

Please don't start limiting the calender to Google and M365. Of course I know that a lot of larger companies in the US are on google and in EMEA even more on M365 - but I really do belive that you are limiting your product right from the beginning. I do work with Startups and it is NOT unusual that they use alternatives like icloud. I think as a bare minimum you should over webcal in view only - but really think you should also add support support for icloud.

A few examples:
SuperHuman - Only Google (and I think M365): no iCloud: Interested users are searching (and finding) for alternatives and likely dont come back

Calendly - supports all major platforms including iCloud; many of there competitors only support Google/M365... why are so many Startups using Calendly? Becuase they need the support for all of these platforms.

Zoom just added "Zoom Scheduling" and first released if after they where also able to add iCloud support (says "in Beta" but available to everyone).

I really think that if the calendar feature is interesting to people to have in trello... but they are not able to, they will look even more into alternatives or build something themselves in Obsidian (Kanban/Tasks/Calendar plugins) or Notion... but for sure if they build something tailored to there usecase - they will not come back.

just my 50 cent

[Maître Juliette Courteau]

Hello, I love the new planner feature (I use it in integration with google calendar).

Althougt, would it be possible to integrate the tasks and blocked hours in a specific calendar attached to our basic calendar (just like the birthday calendar or the holidays calendar for instance) ?

It is quite complicated to maintain a clear view of the real events when all the tasks appear alongside them in my weekly or monthly calendar.

It would be super great to be able to check or uncheck the trello tasks calendar in my google calendar tab.

Like so, we could have a clear view on the planned events for a week or a month (like appointements, meeting and such, but without the trello tasks) on one tab, and trello with the tasks planner (let's say, per day or three days) on an other tab.

Thanks for your feedback on the topic !

[avashije]

I love the idea of the new day planning method, however, I'm trying to figure out how I'll be adding today's task into my day plan. Before, I would go to my workspace view that I set up to show me which cards were assigned to me, filtered by due date. It seems I can actually see the same information by just going to my profile and then Cards, but then I can't really drag the tasks that are due today into the calendar view, and it's clunky to go back and forth from my cards page into the rest of trello. Can someone please share how they get their overview of tasks by due date to refer to throughout the day?

[Josh DeBoer]

The new features are nice, but in my organization, we don't use Google, so the Planner is pointless. I personally do not like the floating menu (yuck) as the boards and planner are not going to be used, so its added clutter. I would just add the menu to the top. The inbox is very well done, as I can track my to-dos outside of my projects here, just please add labels! 

[Josh DeBoer]

All this and still no real dashboard overview of all the checklist items assigned to you, the HOME screen that lists "Your Items" is junk. Can we please have a section to show me my tasks for all my projects????

[Matthew Leigh]

"(also, where are my boards?)"

So, uh... where are they? I like the split screen view, but I want to be able to see a list of all my boards as one of the split screens

[Iain M Norman]

Looks like everything I was gonna say as a UX professional AND as a developer is being championed by Rasmus. Thanks!

[Drew Olbrich]

I appreciate the new redesign, and in particular the new board switcher view.

However, speaking from the perspective of a user who does not use the new inbox or planner features, and only makes use of the board view, I have these observations:

1. The new navigation control at the bottom of the screen and the large blank areas alongside it take up considerable screen real estate, and are distracting. Please consider adding an option to hide the navigation control.

2. If I make the Trello window less than 2/3 the width of my laptop screen, the window bar (macOS) is completely filled with the search bar and the other controls, and no longer functions as a window bar. There are no blank areas to grab the window bar to move the window. Please provide a small amount of blank space to one side of the search bar in this case.

Thank you for considering these suggestions. In terms of UX design, I do understand that it is challenging to weave together the complexity of the new inbox and planner features with simpler user cases.

[John Walker]

I like the new inbox and the switcher. When will it be rolled out across all platforms/devices/browsers? Working on my Android, but not iOS. Working in the Mac app but not in-browser.

[Alexandros Mathopoulos]

@John Walker Appreciate the feedback! The beta should be available across IOS, Android, Desktop and browser. For IOS you may have to update the app and in browser you may have to hard refresh the page.