Improving our UX: data and structure

This summer we set as one of our goals to improve our user experience (UX). Although ease of use is one of Kantree advantages, we believed we could do better on a number of more advanced features and as a result make them more accessible to everybody. We spent some time investigating to understand where we were failing.

We came up with a single principle which helped us reshape many aspects of Kantree and enabled great improvements: the editing of the data and its structure must happen at the same time, in the same place. This is the key to create easy to use but highly customizable products.

The most notable application of this principle is in Excel. The columns and their style (the structure) are edited at the same level as the cells’ content (the data). It makes it easy to build a representation of the data as you imagine it.

In Kantree, creating new card groups (the structure) happens in the same place as creating new cards (the data). However, adding new attributes to cards (the structure) is only possible from the settings and not from the card itself (the data) which makes it needlessly complicated and forces you to leave your context. This is the kind of UX problems we spent the summer working on and that will be released in September as part of a major update of Kantree.

As described before, the most notable change is the possibility to edit card models directly from the card itself. Here is a preview:

Following the same idea, we improved the way to create different “contexts” (renamed from “group types”) and manage the default project template and allowed editing in the table view.

On top of these improvements, we made many aspects of the interface easier to use and simplified some concepts (eg. card models are now much more straightforward to use).

All these changes and many more will be released in September!