Where is the recursive functionality?

[jcklpe]

I tried the demo on the kanception.io website but couldn't figure out how to actually use the rescursive functionality. 

I've always wanted a recursive kanban but I'm a design technologist, and barely a frontend guy. I would be willing to help with "front of the frontend" and design stuff if you wanted.

[hpennington]

Hey @jcklpe thanks for trying out the product. If you hover over a card, an arrow comes up. Click it to go down a level, or use the back button, in the toolbar, to go up a level.

Design and UX are my weakness. I'd love any help I can get.

[jcklpe]

Hmm strange, I tried it on FF and it wasn't working. Just tried it on Chrome and it works better so maybe it's a browser issue. 

Have you seen the way that workflowy or roam do things with bullet lists? 
https://workflowy.com/

https://roamresearch.com/

I think you could adopt an approach similar to this but using kanban cards. You have the basic idea of a recursive kanban but the way it's being visually communicated is a little off. 

So I don't want to come crashing into someone else's project and telling them what to do, so please just consider this my unasked for opinion on things haha. Take it with a grain of salt. 

One way to better enforce the concept of a recursive kanban I think would be to thing of things in terms of nested lists, like workflowy. 

Instead of thinking of it as

Space Name
To Do    Doing     Done (board level columns)

• item 1 (under doing) (board)
  • To Do    Doing    Done
    • Item 2 (under doing)

Think of it more like this:

• Space Name (1st level item)
  • To Do (2nd level item)
  • Doing (2nd level item)
    • Item 1 (3rd level item)
      • To Do (4th level item)
      • Doing (4th level item)
        • Item 2 (5th level item)
      • Done (4th level item)
  • Done (2nd level item)

I could do some mockups on how I think this would look but it's a pretty big shift in your functionality so I don't know if you're down for that. Like I said I don't want to come into someone else's project and start giving them a bunch of opinions. 

Outside of that there's also a bunch of general look and feel things I'd recommend, but I think that presentation of the recursion is the most up front issue that should be addressed.

[hpennington]

Ah, I really like the Workflowy way of doing it. I could see having a hierarchical "tree" with all the cards in it. I don't mind you coming and and expressing your ideas! My goal for this project is to be a community driven project.

Anyway, some mockups would be awesome.

[jcklpe]

@hpennington Actually I mentioned my desire for a recursive kanban and someone mentioned that workflowy already has a "kanban view": https://blog.workflowy.com/2020/06/10/fractal-boards-a-new-way-to-organize

There's some functionality missing here. No "card centric" type features like tags, comments etc. But it does a pretty good job of showing how I would approach recursive kanban stuff.

[hpennington]

@jcklpe Thanks for the UX tip even if you don't end up using Kanception. I think this could breathe some life into the project

[jcklpe]

@hpennington: So I decided to move over my trello boards to workflowy and discovered: workflowy doesn't support image attachements of any type. It's just text. Which makes sense but is still kind of frustrating. 

I'm going to do a quick mockup how I think kanception could work.

[jcklpe]

@hpennington : Actually I just remembered there's an open source clone of Workflowy called [Bullet Notes](https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/BulletNotes) and it looks like they even have the kanban feature that Workflowy has. So perhaps that might be a project to join forces on?

[hpennington]

@jcklpe The problem with joining forces is who would be the final decision maker? I'd image me and NickBusey would both want to be the decision maker.

[jcklpe]

You can always fork it.

[hpennington]

I'm not ready to do that at this time. I could always change my mind if given a compelling argument.

[hpennington]

Hey @jcklpe I implemented a tree view. See if that makes it any better

[jcklpe]

@hpennington : I tried it out at the kanception website but I don't see any differences or tree view? 

As for compelling arguments: I mean it's really up to you. I think the workflowy and bullet notes take a generally right approach and the way that I would differences to their ux are largely matters of improving or building off that basic structure. 

Also going to the kanception website I saw a good example of the kind of issue I see generally in the app as it stands:

 

You mix serif and san serif fonts, and not in a clearly intentional way. 

Also white is too light to put on yellow. Different colors have different visibility to the human eye, and appear "brighter" or "darker". Your eye has 3 types of cells for detecting colored light, that focus in on roughly Red, Blue, and Green. Red is at one end of the spectrum and Blue is at the other end (purple is actual an illusion caused by the harmonic effect of overlapping blue and red frequencies similar to how octaves work in music, except that your eye only can see roughly one octave ). Your eye is most sensitive to green and yellow colors because they're in the middle of that spectrum. Also because that's just how our eyes evolved to see green grass and yellow sunlight. 

 

Because of this green and yellow "look" brighter and therefore contrast poorly with white text. 

Ah but what about the green button on github with it's white text? 

Well if you look at this green using an HSL notation you'll see it's actually pretty dark. It looks nice and bright green because it's green. Green is just brighter to average human perception. 

The same color but red looks quite dark:

Anyway sorry for the tangent. Point is that button is whack hard to see. 

If you want to avoid this stuff you can use accessibility testing tools like this to help: 

https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Though honestly I just use Google's Material Design color palette as a cheat since they have tuned each part of the hue spectrum with text:

 

Notice how none of the yellow have white text? That's because you have to make yellow so dark it's basically brown in order to require white text.

[hpennington]

See the video https://youtu.be/6andyzxx5PQ it shows me using the new tree view on the left.

The points you make about the UI are good. I will change the white text and the font for sure.

[jcklpe]

@hpennington : Oh yah, I see that's the thing on the side right? That helps, though I think the round styling around stuff adds a bit of visual noise, and the issue to me is more about how you transition from one level to the next. The tree view helps but there is still some stuff with how the actual layers are shown. 

Part of this problem is that each board piece is a board, and within that board you have the backlog, doing, done  columns. But I think it makes more sense to make the backlog, doing, done stuff themselves cards, which is what workflowy etc do. A column is merely a card displayed horizontally rather than vertically. 

so 

-backlog
  -item one
-doing
  - task 
  - task
     - backlog
         - task
     - doing
         - task
     - done
- done
  - task
  - task
  - task

Seek how the tasks and a "board" and a category of status (doing/done/backlog) etc are all the same basic atomic unit? That allows for a lot of flexibility. But that's a pretty big shift in how kanception is currently set up. IDK if that's something you want to do, just giving my take on the matter.

[hpennington]

@jcklpe I'll remove the blue border and see how it looks.

What are some concrete examples of how making the groups cards can be flexible? I'm open to the idea, but I need real features that will com from making such a large change.

[jcklpe]

@hpennington :  Like I said, it's your project, I'm just offering my view on it. Design wise I think the ability to reduce everything to that same sort of unit makes things a lot simpler.