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!
Yes!! Thank you! This looks like it solves most of my troubles with the update. New colors in the top section = huge improvement, and the enter key + save buttons are huge as well. Thanks!
I've had two clients use tracker and love it, but ultimately move to something else due to a lack of portfolio-level visibility. Both clients said Tracker was "not friendly to large teams" -- it took quite a bit of digging ("five whys" and booze) to figure out exactly what they meant.
One feature I would suggest is to enhance the dashboard to do two things: 1) show the first "red" release marker for any project in my portfolio. At the executive/director level, I don't care about good news, or even velocity specifically. I want to know if something looks late and is going to require some face-to-face communication. Release markers can go red intermittently as a team moves things around, so I really only want the dashboard to report this potential issue to me if the release marker stays red for longer than a set period of time. (Reporting after a period of inactivity won't work due to large, geographically disparate teams.)
2) if multiple release markers are red and they have approximately the same name or date, collate them so the list of potentially bad news for a product release doesn't require scrolling. Even with truly cross-functional development teams, there is often date coordination across many teams: having marketing materials ready, hardware being acquired and deployed, etc. If I go to the trouble of manually making sure that each team has a release marker for "SHIP IT" and it's due on or around the same date, I need Tracker's dashboard to realize that this is a coordinated release across several projects in the portfolio and not flood me with data.
Stacked red bars (like a CI display), where the release marker name is prominent (and clickable), and the individual project(s) that have red release markers are small and clickable, would be great for these executive/director-level folks.
I know that there are certain things tracker doesn't do. When people genuinely outgrow the concept of what tracker provides, I recommend something else. In these two cases, they just needed additional visibility of coordinated efforts across projects. Even if tracker doesn't supply a direct way of creating/managing those implicit "links".
I'm happy to come in and pair on this sometime :)
Big improvements! Really appreciate the continued upgrades. I'm a particularly big fan of the Cmd+s
Matt, thanks for the suggestions. High level, "portfolio" visibility across projects is most definitely on our near-term roadmap, red/green CI style.
Hi.
I am lacking a good time/date on the new story view. Its hard for me to tell if the story is 1 year old and outdated or if it was posted 1 day ago and is something important.
So when are the 'epics' (story bundles) arriving?
With the update, it seems like attachments cannot be disabled anymore. We might be part of a minority that used that option before but it was nice to prevent unintentional data disclosure. Any chance this option will be available again soon?
Two more suggestions:
I'd like to have a custom story view with two columns. Left column is titled "Prioritized Stories" and shows Current+Backlog+Icebox (collapsable weeks like it is now but with Icebox as very last group). Right column is titled "People" and has collapsable groups for "Me" and then for each of the people on this project (where each collapsable group has the stories assigned to that person).
I'd like to make that custom view the default for anybody who views this project.
Thanks!
I second the portfolio visibility. I actually have some devs starting on a "dashboard" using the API tomorrow.
We have 95+ projects going at any one time and knowing which projects have "hiccups" or are in danger of missing dates or features would be really helpful.
I would be happy to share the project wireframes if they would help.
As a former Product Manager for Spinscape, I know what it takes to make a product like PT work and I appreciate all the hard work!
Mark
@Oskar
Apparently they are in beta:
http://community.pivotaltracker.com/pivotal/topics/epics_story_panel_is_so_much_nicer
Jeremy Lin would be pleased.
Please extend the capabilities of story breakdown into tasks by adding:
Thanks Rupert
Would love to see some sort of "mentions" capability added to the notes. It would be nice to collaborate with people other than the Requester or Owner of the story. I've seen some tools adopt the use of the "@" symbol. When a user types "@" and the first couple characters of somebody's name, a list of names is presented to the user. You can select a name and continue to type your message. Doing so creates a "mention." People that are "mentioned" receive an email notification with the comment (just like the notification today that goes to the requester / owner).
Following on from Rupert Schmidtberg's comment, we'd also like the following enhancements adding:
Thanks!