Limitations as Guidelines for “Next”
No commentsThe whole Zero2Beta concept is about limitations:
limited team + limited time = limited scope
A part of the experiment is to use the limitations to our advantage, which drove us to adopt the following guidelines regarding “Next” our simple to-do list:
- Reinvention: we decided to take a whole new look at to-do lists and took a radically new approach that involved dumping time all together and focusing instead on a manageable amount of tasks that most of us handle in couple of days. It’s a substitute for the sticky note or the notepad that you use for a day or so worth-of-tasks.
- Minimalism: instead of taking the whole domain of to-do lists and simplifying it, we decided to start from scratch taking one task at any time, and then building up the app bit by bit to reach the minimum acceptable level for a practical and intuitive to-do list.
- Enforcement: the tricky thing about to-do lists is that we “as users” tend to overwhelm ourselves and instead of using the to-do list to simplify our lives, we end up creating monstrous lists that are scary even to look at let alone try to tackle. Next is about directed enforcement to achieve:
- Drive the user to handle one task at a time.
- Keep tasks short and meaningful in less than 140 characters.
- No more than 20 tasks to tackle in the conceivable future (next couple of days).
- Focus: by limiting the user to one task on the homepage at any time, we encourage users to focus on the task at hand, without any consideration to the other tasks or what’s next until you’re done.
You will get a feel of those idea when you get to try the app tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under App1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.