Last week, we launched a complete redesign of stories, as part of our ongoing effort to make Tracker easier and more enjoyable to use. We’ve received a great amount of feedback about what’s working well in the new design, as well as what could be improved. As a product team, we’re extremely lucky to have users who time and again have shown such passion – thank you, we really couldn’t do this without you!

The redesign was a big change and involved some significant behind-the-scenes investments for big upcoming features. There were a few bumps after the release, and we’ve rolled out a number of fixes over the last week as well as some design tweaks based on your feedback. See below for the complete list.

Here’s what’s new since last week.

• You can now navigate through all of the drop-downs and select values with the keyboard.
• When adding a new story, in addition to being able to move through the story types and point estimates with your left/right cursor, you can also choose values with a single key. Use F/B/C/R for Feature/Bug/Chore/Release, and the number keys to pick an estimate.
• CTRL + S (or CMD + S on a Mac) now save stories.
• Enter and escape work everywhere again, to save changes or cancel.
• The overall visual design has been adjusted to improve contrast and scannability, especially in the top section.
• There’s now a save button at the top of new stories, for more consistency between creating and editing.
• We’ve adjusted the gray background to a warmer color.
• Clicking on a file attachment thumbnail or file name should open the file inline in the browser, at least for most file types. To download a file, use the cogwheel menu next to file attachments.
• The ‘view all images’ page now shows upload date/times.
• The Flash-based ‘click-to-copy’ feature for story ID and URL can ow be explicitly disabled on the Profile page, for those having trouble with Flash. When disabled, your stories will show a text field for both story ID and URL, which should auto-select when clicked into for easy copy and paste.
• Story tasks can once again be disabled in project settings, if you’re not using them.

We’re by no means done, and the design will continue to evolve, and we’re working to improve story manipulation and drag/drop performance, especially on larger projects.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

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Stories in Pivotal Tracker have been given a serious upgrade. For the most part it’s all pretty self explanatory – the functionality you’re used to is all there, just in a format that’s more intuitive, user friendly and hopefully you’ll agree, more appealing. Our advice, play with it and then come back and read the rest of this post, especially if anything is confusing.

You’re back, so let’s continue!

One of the goals of Tracker has always been to make collaboration around your story backlog as easy as possible, so that your team spends less time managing your project and more of it actually building things. We think there’s room to make that not just easier, but more enjoyable, even fun! So to that end, great usability and user experience are major themes in our backlog for 2012, starting with this story redesign.

See below for all the highlights.

New Look and Feel

Like we said, stories look different, and are hopefully a lot easier to work with now. It’s a complete redesign, with a color scheme that fits better with the rest of the Tracker UI, and that’s intended to make the important information in a story stand out more – such as the story title, description, comments, code commits, and file attachments.

Besides visual appeal, we’re aiming to reduce clicks – for example, when creating a new story, it only takes one click to choose a story type or point estimate value. And, you can now start, finish, deliver, or accept/reject an expanded story with one click, with the familiar buttons.

Click to Copy ID and Story URL

We heard your feedback about having to scroll down in stories to find their IDs, to copy them to your commit messages (you are using the source commit integration, right?). So, we’ve moved the ID to the top of stories, and made it so that you can copy the ID to the clipboard with one click (on the ID button).

The same is true for the story URL, for when you need to send someone a link to the story. Just click the link button in the top left corner, and the story’s full URL will be copied to the clipboard. Note – you’ll need Flash enabled in your browser for these to work. If you don’t have Flash, you’ll see the full URL on a separate line, so you can copy it the old way.

Less commonly used actions, including delete and view history, have been moved to the “More” menu, which is where we’ll be adding some other convenience actions soon.

File Attachments on Comments

One big change in this redesign is that files are now attached to stories as part of posting a comment, rather than as a separate list. This is because files are commonly uploaded and shared in the context of an on-going conversation, and it’s so much easier to refer to a file that’s actually part of that comment (e.g. “Here’s that icon”) rather than having to say “see the file named foo.gif at the bottom of the story”.

You can still drag and drop files from your desktop to stories, and entering an actual comment when adding files is optional – just drop your files on a story and close it.

View All Images and Comment Filtering

The truth is, thumbnails of mockups attached to a story can be indistinguishable from one another. Sometimes you just need to see them all full sized, on one page. Now, with just one click of the View All Images link above the Activity section, you can.

We’ve also made it easier to find what you need in a long-winded (all of it beautifully clear and vital) comment conversation – just use the filter dropdown menu at the top right of the Activity section to show just file attachments, just source commits, or all comments without commits.

Feedback

This redesign of stories is the first step in an on-going usability overhaul. We’ve got much more coming over the course of this year, but we’d like to incorporate your feedback at every step, so please let us know what you think so far, in the comments here or by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

We’ve got a major update of Pivotal Tracker planned for this weekend, which requires downtime while we run a fairly major database schema migration.

The update is planned for Saturday, Feb. 4, at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time (PST), or 17:00 UTC, and we expect it to take approximately one hour.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but we’re hopeful that you’ll like what we’re rolling out!

For real time status updates, please follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter.

We’re planning the first of an on-going series of Webinars for Pivotal Tracker users for next Wednesday, Dec 21, at 11:00am PST (19:00 GMT).

This is going to be a 1 hour session, via GoToWebinar. Anyone is more than welcome to join, but this particular session will be geared towards new Tracker users. We’ll go over the agile concepts behind Tracker, show how to get started with your first project, and give you a tour of the most commonly used features. At the end, there will be an opportunity to ask plenty of questions.

Please register in advance, at the following URL:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/520854266

Instructions for how to join the Webinar will be emailed to you after you register. Since GoToWebinar requires you to download and install an app to join, we suggesting connecting a few minutes before 11:00am on Wednesday.

See you there!