A little more than a year ago we released Sprint.ly into private beta. In June we removed the invite code. Today we’re removing the beta tag. Over the last year we’ve been actively listening to our current (and former) customers’ major pains.
Those recurring and systemic pains could be summed up as follows:
- Once your backlog has too many items in it it becomes very difficult to manage and organize things.
- Sprint.ly makes it very easy for anyone in the company to create items, but non-technical users often create tickets with the wrong assignee, improper tags, etc. This can cause confusion as it keeps managers out of the normal flow of items.
- Sub-items are regularly pointed out as one of our killer features, but they often get lost in the shuffle.
- Sprint.ly’s UI, while very pretty, can make it very difficult to see everything that is going on.
- Mentions, comments, attachments, and other activity can get lost in the shuffle.
I’m happy to report that we’ve addressed all of the above and more with Sprint.ly 1.0.
Introducing the New Item Card
Our new item card is a massive update over the old one. It’s 40% slimmer and includes 40% more information than our old item card. Additionally, it is 100% click-to-edit. You can modify tags, assignee, and score directly from the card. The edit and delete link are always present as are the various workflow buttons.
This new card design has been rolled out across the site. The dashboard view, items view, and all popovers now use this design (and, yes, the popovers are fully editable).
Introducing Someday and the new Items View
A big problem with the items view was that you could rarely see more than 10-15 items, even on a big monitor. That, suffice it to say, is no longer an issue. Our new item card is 40% slimmer, but our new ultra slim view sports an even slimmer single line view. We have also switched to a two column layout. With the ultra slim view I can easily see 30+ cards on my 11” MacBook Air.
Along the top you’ll notice a new flow with four steps: Triage (Someday + Backlog), Underway (Backlog + Current), Pending (Current + Complete), and Done (Complete + Accepted).
“Someday? What’s that?!” We have switched our old feature into a new status that all new items will default to. This allows you to keep an unorganized list of everything you might want to do “someday” while keeping your backlog lean and mean. If you’ve already been using our archive feature for this purpose, there’s nothing left to do. If you haven’t, don’t worry as we’ve automatically marked any item that hasn’t been active for 30 days as Someday.
Sub-Items are Always Visible in Items View
A major update to the items view, besides all of the other goodies above, is that sub-items are always shown. This manifests itself in two ways:
- Sub-items that match your filters that share the same status as their parent show up underneath them.
- Sub-items that do not share their parent’s status (e.g. they haven’t been started or were completed before their parent) will show up in their appropriate column with a slim view of their parent above.
Introducing Activity Feeds
Our new activity feeds are a powerful new addition to Sprint.ly. You can filter for activity using our items filter interface, which means you can find activity by tag, by type, assigne, and your saved filters. Additionally, you can facet the results by activity type. At the top of the activity feeds is a simple spark line of activity so you can see at a glance how work is progressing.
One more thing, it’s entirely real-time push enabled. As new activity matching your query happens within Sprint.ly, they will be pushed to the top of your feed. So sit back and watch the team work. We think activity feeds look great on the big board.
So if you’ve found yourself wondering what your team is up to, wonder no more. All it takes to find out now is a simple click over to your product’s activity feed.
Sprint.ly 1.0 is the result of two months of coding and nearly a year of customer development. If you’re already one of our customers, we hope we’ve made Sprint.ly damn near perfect for you. If you’re not a customer of ours yet, give us a try for 30 days for free.
NOTE: All customers can sign up for a free, live training webinar on Sprint.ly 1.0.
