Trello User Guidelines

Overview

This page describes guidelines for Action Group participants using Trello boards under the Fab Lab San Diego 'team'.

As of 2015-10-23 AG stewards meeting, these are some initial guidelines which will be tried across all boards to assess their ongoing usability.

Trello terminology

The Trello system presents a hierarchy of features, for which it's helpful to know the names. In particular, avoid confusion between "List" and "Card".

More completely:

At a top level, Trello defines teams, which own of boards. From there:

• Board, contains
• Lists (a list is effectively a column, since lists cannot be placed below one another). A List contains
  
• Cards. Cards capture a task. Title and summary information is displayed in the board view. Additional information is "on the back", available by clicking the card. This includes
• Checklist(s)
• Comments
• Images
• Members assigned
• Due date
• Labels

With these features:

• Lists (columns) can be dragged horizontally to new positions, though as noted in Guidelines below, we will generally avoid doing that
  
• Cards can be dragged from one list to another. This is the means to indicate a task's progression through phases of work.
• Checklist items can be checked off, and this is reflected in a fraction complete indicator on the card front.
  

Trello documentation:

• https://trello.com/guide
• https://trello.com/guide/board_basics.html

Relative to other task tracking systems

If you are familiar with other task tracking systems, such as Scrum-based ones, note that Trello offers only basic features for task tracking. It does not, for example, capture points per task, nor roll up progress per board. For the most part, the "reporting" capability is simply looking at what people have entered into Trello, in the form they've entered it. The main exception is the calendar view, which portrays the cards organized by due date. (This feature was not switched on for our boards as of this writing, and it's usefulness has not been assessed.)

Guidelines

Boards

As of 2015-10-23 we are proceeding with one board per Action Group. Trello documentation is happy to promote how easy it is to add boards, but for the present, we want to limit the proliferation of boards that participants have to know about.

Columns

The 2015-10-23 AG stewards meeting settled upon the following columns in hopes of supporting participants in tracking tasks, and leadership in understanding activity and progress. These are hoped to be a balance between simplicity, screen fit, and level of detail tracking. We will assess whether the columns, in conjunction with other Trello features (such as checklists and other card features), satisfy the needs adequately, and revisit in coming months.

In general, the columns proceed left to right in order of chronological steps or progress.

Related information

Trello presents many sample boards here: https://trello.com/inspiration

Graham W surveyed then here http://grahamwideman.wikispaces.com/Trello+-+Inspiration+Survey to distill the columns most commonly used for which purposes.