We’re excited to share some improvements that have been asked for by several users and have improved the way we work together here on the Podio Engineering team: Customizable Card Layouts.
As software developers, we’re lucky to use our own product as part of the everyday workflow. By “eating our own dog food” and actively using Podio for nearly everything we do, we get to experience what it’s like for our users.
We’re an Agile development team, so we plan, manage and track our workload collaboratively and transparently. One pain point we were running into was that we couldn’t quickly and easily review our work items during our daily stand-up meetings. The Table Layout didn’t tell a very interesting story, Badge Layout didn’t give us good overview of our actual progress, and the original Card Layout just didn’t give us the information we needed.
What we really wanted to do was use our custom Badges in the card layout, so we put together a quick experiment and hacked Badges to show up in place of Cards. This worked as a proof of concept but, as you can imagine, it wasn’t much to look at and we didn’t like that we had to reuse our Badge configuration for both layouts.
The changes we made just weren’t good enough to share yet, so we leaned into the idea a little bit harder with some visual tweaks and added customizable Card Layout settings under Settings / Layout Options.
While thrilled with the improvements, we were pretty frustrated with all the side-scrolling to skip empty categories we weren’t interested in. To fix this, we’ve tied the Filters into the display of columns.
In addition to the configuration, filtering and visual refinements, we included some colors to both the cards and to the outer layout. If the field you base your columns on is a Category field, we’ll use the color you selected to make the layout more useful at a glance.
We’re absolutely delighted to share what started as an internal experiment with you and hope you like it as much as we do. We’d love to hear your feedback on our Customizable Card Layouts.
P.S. The dedicated user might also have noticed new round avatars in Podio today. We shipped this update along with the improved Card Layout to give a fresh new look in the UI. Same update will follow on mobile in the upcoming release.