On Feb. 16, project management app Trello announced a “once-in-decade refresh” of its Kanban board-style productivity software to better meet the needs of remote workers.
The Atlassian-owned platform, which has more than 50 million users, is changing its logo, updating its illustrations and adding multiple new board views and capabilities. It is also making it easier for users to integrate data from third-party services, such as Google Drive, Slack and Jira.
In a blog post, Trello co-founder Michael Pryor explained that the platform “became many people’s new offices” during the pandemic. This sudden shift to distributed work “led to an exponential increase in digital work artifacts scattered across apps” as coworkers tried to find remote-friendly ways to plan and complete projects.
The company’s revamp, which allows users to view their work from a central vantage point, is “built specifically to support teams as they usher in a new era of work,” Pryor said.
The overhaul keeps the traditional cards, boards and structure that the platform’s users are familiar with, but it also adds five new organizational options that expand both the scope of data that users can access and the ways that they can view it.
The five new options include a team table view for viewing multiple boards, a timeline view for managing deadlines, a calendar view for tracking upcoming projects, a map view for organizing project data and a dashboard view for presenting data in bar, line and pie charts.
Trello is also introducing link cards, board cards and mirror cards to the platform. Link cards can display previews to links from third-party services like Google Docs, Dropbox and YouTube, board cards can display previews to other boards and mirror cards let users pair cards across multiple boards, meaning that changes to one card will be reflected on the others.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Pryor said the pandemic instantly brought the company’s ideas about the “future of work” into the present.
“Now, it’s all distributed,” he said. “We just compressed it all at once, and we had this overnight shift. We would talk previously about this explosion of apps. We would talk about all the browser tabs, people getting lost in information sprawl. Now, it’s just turned up to eleven.”
Trello believes its update will help remote workers better manage this “sprawl” of data in a post-pandemic world. The company also hopes the changes help stave off competition from alternative project management apps like Asana.
Other tech companies are trying to adapt to the remote work era as well. In early February, Microsoft followed the leads of Limeade and Qualtrics by releasing Viva, an employee experience platform designed to help distributed coworkers and supervisors connect with each other.