We weren’t bluffing. We met with James Kennedy on Monday to hear his idea for a web application. It’s Friday now, and we’re looking at the implementation. This isn’t a prototype, or a proof of concept. This is a real web application, open for business from today. Here’s how we did it.
Discovery
We had a discovery workshop with James on Monday morning. We’ve already told you about the application, and it’s core principle of Five things a day. We listened to his pitch, and once we agreed on the requirements, we got to work.
Sketching out interfaces
This application is all about letting you & your colleagues share a worksheet where everyone can see what progress other people are making. We focussed on the task view, and went through several different views & orientations.
Wireframes
Once we had decided on one, I got to work designing wireframes in Omnigraffle. At this stage I add proper labels, content and the like, to ensure we’re wireframing in the real world. We started talking about page interactions, exploring what made sense and what was feasible. James had been using a spreadsheet, so we looked at Excel and replicated the features that seemed necessary (drag&drop, tabbing , double click to edit).
Coding
Paul & Dave got busy deciding domain models, configuring our server (donated by Hosting 365), and writing the basics of the system. Dave moved onto the backend work straight away, while Paul wrote the jQuery to give our application all the interactive goodness it needs.
Visual design
Eoghan worked through a few different design ideas on Monday & Tuesday before settling on a strong clean concept. This served as our design target for the week, and we nailed it.
Launch
Today, after testing some of the last components to be added (paypal integration, sms & email notifications etc), we looked back at our original 2 user stories. At 6pm we stepped through each of the scenarios and everything worked! We called James to get the all clear, and voila! The idea we first heard about on Monday is live on Friday. The site is now live at TaskFive.com.
We’re Contrast. We do web apps.
52 Comments
Incredible work guys - I’m really impressed. You make it look so easy
I’m going to check it out now. I’d love to hear more from you about time-saving techniques/tricks/libraries etc that helped you guys meet your deadline.
Posted by Beau Lebens at 7:03 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Well done lads.
Posted by Marcus Mac Innes at 7:13 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Congrats guys, the app looks great! Very impressive how you got through it all in a week.
Posted by Ciaran Lee at 7:32 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Well done - playing with it now!
Posted by Grant at 8:01 pm on 24 October, 2008.
That’s one beautiful little app. Well done guys.
Posted by Alan O'Rourke at 8:16 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Posted by Robin Blandford at 8:26 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Posted by Niall Larkin at 8:52 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Congrats lads, that’s well f**king cool.
Posted by Dave Cahill at 9:05 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Quite a week’s work there - congrats! Hopefully you guys have the long weekend to recover
Enjoyed following the updates on Twitter too
Posted by Janine at 9:12 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Well done ! Can’t wait to test this out !
Posted by paul savage at 10:00 pm on 24 October, 2008.
Fantastic work guys! Well done, It looks great
Posted by Keith at 8:35 am on 25 October, 2008.
Impressive work, congrats!
Posted by ShekMan at 9:25 am on 25 October, 2008.
Wondeful initiative, wondeful outcome. Well done lads!
Posted by James Corbett at 11:14 am on 25 October, 2008.
Very nice work - congrats!
Posted by Eric at 5:51 pm on 25 October, 2008.
That’s really great. Well done guys.
Posted by Michael Flanagan at 6:53 pm on 25 October, 2008.
Nice work guys, the app. works well and I love the design.
Contrast is the 37Signals of Ireland
Posted by Paul M. Watson at 8:38 pm on 25 October, 2008.
Guys, it turns out that this James Kennedy is actually Eoghan’s cousin, and that they’ve heard about ‘Task Five’ for much longer than a week, in fact, a couple of months.
They outsourced a lot of the work, so what they’ve ‘done’ is actually really pathetic.
If you in anyway fell for that, then God love you! No seriously guys, fantastic work, what a wonderful little application that I’d love to use.
Regards,
Edmund.
Posted by Edmund Heaphy at 7:06 pm on 26 October, 2008.
Maybe I didn’t stress it enough, just that the above is a joke.
Posted by Edmund Heaphy at 7:07 pm on 26 October, 2008.
Everyone in Ireland is a cousin…
Posted by Paul M. Watson at 7:53 pm on 26 October, 2008.
Brilliant - well done.
Posted by David Horn at 11:41 am on 27 October, 2008.
Great work guys!!!
Posted by Niyaz at 12:57 pm on 27 October, 2008.
Nice work! That’s really cool. I think I am inspired…
p.s. Looks like an awesome app too. I’m all about to do lists and I have yet to find the perfect one. I’ll give this a shot.
Posted by Rewdy at 2:58 pm on 27 October, 2008.
very cool. get it working with Yammer and you are onto something!
Chris
Posted by chris at 5:09 pm on 27 October, 2008.
Awesome work. Inspiring too. You guys rock!
Posted by Jan at 5:15 pm on 27 October, 2008.
That’s gorgeous. I think I’ve just become a diehard fan of your team. Nearly a pitch-perfect launch.
One small niggling thing: no dialogue when I save settings? I know that a dialogue box might ruin the elegant interface, but perhaps a hovering message like Humanized suggests? http://humanized.com/weblog/2006/09/11/monolog_boxes_and_transparent_messages/
Posted by Rory Marinich at 5:20 pm on 27 October, 2008.
@Rory - Thanks for your feedback , we’ll look into it.
FWIW re: transparent overlays, I’m not entirely convinced. People seem to believe that if something is transparent it is “okay” The reality is that semi-transparent dialogues get in your way just as much. No one looks “through” them to carry on using the app.
One goal we had for this app was to do away with unnecessary nonsense , e.g. “Congratulations, you’ve logged in successfully” , “You’ve logged out successfully”, “Your task has been saved/moved/deleted”. We only interrupt the user if something is wrong. In the same way car dashboards usually don’t have a “driving straight” light.
But I agree with your point, there are areas where the user needs re-assurance, and we’ll look at it.
Thanks for your kind words, I’ll keep an eye on your tumblelog.
Regards,
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 10:20 pm on 27 October, 2008.
Personally I like your work better than 37Signals. Especially your design, both visual and functional. Your website, this blog, your apps, I’m digging it and taking many notes.
Posted by Che at 11:09 am on 28 October, 2008.
One small suggestion, on the account settings and sign-up. Put a ‘+’ in front of all the country area codes. I wasn’t sure what was going on there for a second. Either that or actaully say country code.
other than that seems clean and easy to use.. will give it a try. Like others, have yet to find something that works for me on the screen instead of notepad.
Posted by Derek Organ at 12:21 pm on 28 October, 2008.
@Derek - good suggestion. The country codes confused me too…
Posted by Marcus Mac Innes at 12:23 pm on 28 October, 2008.
Cute. Easy to use. Worth a try at least.
When will it get its own dedicated domain? Not sure I should expect http://appschool.contrast.ie/ to survive (in this form) once you do the next.
Posted by James at 12:59 pm on 28 October, 2008.
@Derek thanks for that, we’ll change it on our next deploy.
@James - Thanks! Yes, we’ll have it live on its own domain very soon.
Posted by Des Traynor at 1:25 pm on 28 October, 2008.
Nice work lads, one question - regarding your other Dev work, was this project run in conjunction with any others, or was it an all-hands, three sheets to the wind affair?
Posted by Darragh at 2:51 pm on 28 October, 2008.
Hi Darragh,
It was pretty much all 4 of us, all the time, except Eoghan had to leave on Thursday evening. ‘Three sheets to the wind’ implies we were flailing around though, that wasn’t the case. The five days are planned and executed with a pretty high degree of precision. That’s one thing we insist on when we do 5 day applications.
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 2:59 pm on 28 October, 2008.
@Des - Sorry about that, chose the incorrect phrase, all hands on deck would have been slightly better!!
But yeah, that answers the question, thanks, and well done again, in the middle of playing with it now.
Posted by Darragh at 3:13 pm on 28 October, 2008.
What a great team you have there. Keep it up.
Posted by Joao at 12:08 am on 29 October, 2008.
The best UI I’ve seen in long time.
Posted by peter at 12:24 pm on 29 October, 2008.
Well done guys. Very smart idea (the 5 day app thing). Beautiful work as well. Congratulations…
Posted by Filipe Moreira at 12:41 am on 30 October, 2008.
Loving TastFive. Really great, simple little app.
One thing I’d like, which seems to be missing, is the ability to re-arrange items within a day - so that I can see the ‘next thing’ on my list at a glance, rather than maintaining the order in my head.
Posted by Michael Flanagan at 3:02 pm on 30 October, 2008.
Great application and interaction. My only comment is that the A and S in the TaskFive logo needs to be tightened up a bit.
Posted by Chance at 10:26 pm on 7 November, 2008.
Looks outstanding. However I’ve just tried to add a second user, and when filling out the registration page I received an error: “Company name required”. But there’s no field for it, and besides that would already be set up from the main account.
Also, I emailed support@taskfive.com and it bounced back. Oops!
Regardless, loving the look of this app…
Posted by John D Wells at 2:34 pm on 14 November, 2008.
gentlemen - congrats on the app. it is very useful.
**PLEASE ADD the ability to edit your tasks. this is essential
feature request. it would be nice to have a “parking lot or other area” to dump all of the to-do things in your head and then be able to later assign them to a given day to do. your site fits a good need but unless it has these features like other sites do (e.g. action method online) many people like me will still want to use other sites and require multiple similar sites. you can be the best if you get the best functionality from all of the others.
memiary is very cool and launched abou the same time. i’ve been using that to track what i’ve been doing for more personal stuff. y our 2 products could and should be well integrated. that would be nice!
Posted by jay at 8:10 pm on 14 November, 2008.
@Jay -
Thanks for the feedback
1) You can edit tasks, just double click and edit away
2) If a task isn’t scheduled, it won’t get done. A core principle of the 5 Things a Day technique, is that you have to say WHEN you’ll do something. By forcing you to pick a time,it makes sure it doesn’t become a wishlist
3) Integration with other apps was out of scope for the first release.
Thanks again,
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 1:19 pm on 16 November, 2008.
So far I’m really enjoying TaskFive. One suggestion — have weeks rolling… ie it’s Sunday today and there’s no way for me to drag tasks to next week. Perhaps have yesterday start each week, so uncompleted tasks from the day before can be brought over, or better yet, let users scroll as they like (instead of in one-week blocks).
Posted by Craig at 2:37 pm on 16 November, 2008.
Ah, I didn’t know you could double-click to edit. All those little desktop things we don’t expect in web-apps.
Posted by Paul M. Watson at 6:02 pm on 16 November, 2008.
Des - i think you missed my point above. i understand the philosophy of scheduling tasks. that’s the BEST part of your app. however, tht means that w have to keep a separate to-do list of potential things to schedule somewhere else - on paper, in another app, and so on. that’s why i was suggestig you add a parking lot space. that fits w/your philosophy and GTD and other time management philosophies of getting everything out of your head. then you can use taskfive to select those five things for the day.
people always have a list - it’s in their head or elsewhere - that they arereferring to before they can enter them into the taskfive app.
if you move one step higher in the process you will have a much more valuable service than you do now!
Posted by jay at 11:30 pm on 16 November, 2008.
@jay
I understand where you are coming from with the ‘somedaymaybe’ style list seen in GTD style applications. When I first started working the 5 a day system with Darrell (with pen and paper) I raised the same issue. He countered that if it wasn’t important enough to schedule – it probably wasn’t important enough. I have tried the somedaymaybe lists before and personally it just cluttered up with stuff that wasn’t that important anyway. It did give a sense of ease however. I get this same sense of ease by right clicking and scheduling a task to ‘next month’. It’ll pop up in a month and if it looks like a good idea I’ll schedule it or dump it.
Posted by James Kennedy at 12:05 pm on 17 November, 2008.
@john - the support email is now alive and kicking. Thanks for the heads up on it.
James
Posted by James Kennedy at 2:34 pm on 17 November, 2008.
des - you’re still not understanding my point. i’m not coming from any other “system” this isn’t a someday or a maybe thing.
the point is simple - in order to prioritize 5 things a day yo hve to have a list. i would call this the parking lot of something where you can just take al thoughts out of your head and put them there. then you prioritize those later. people don’t create a new top 5 list out of thin air every day, do they?
hoppe that makes sense…interview some of your users and ask them.
Posted by jay at 5:36 am on 18 November, 2008.
Looks and works great. I love the simplicity of it.
Posted by Jennifer Farley at 5:35 pm on 3 December, 2008.
Wow, great comments
Posted by mister at 8:44 am on 5 December, 2008.
Hi!
My name is Jessika!
Posted by Beaulseskakly at 11:51 am on 12 December, 2008.
Loving the simplicity of the app lads. It is nearly just what I was looking for, unfortunately I have between 8-15 tasks to complete a day. When is taskfifteen.com coming out? Also it would be great to be able to delete from the right click menu for other team members when jobs are cancelled.
Posted by Teo Rudabah at 2:23 pm on 13 January, 2009.
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