A few weeks back when Trello announced their unlimited labels update, I wrote a post about how it broke my usage pattern by significantly increasing keystrokes required to label cards.
Just discovered, by mistake, an even faster way to label than I’ve ever used before. Not sure if this is new, or I was just doing it the harder way all this time.
When hovering over a card, or with a card open, just press the number(s) of all the labels you want to toggle. No need to prepend it with ‘L’ at all!
Here’s how the keystroke count (from the earlier post) looks now.
Target: toggle labels 1 & 3.
My old usage pattern: 4 keystrokes (L + 1 + 3 + Enter)
Forced usage pattern after unlimited labels update: 6 keystrokes (L + 1 + Enter + L + 3 + Enter)
New usage pattern: 2 keystrokes(1 + 3)
Simply put, the number of keystrokes to toggle N labels has gone from N+2, to 3N to just N.
I’m not just pleased, I’m positively delighted! My love, respect, and addiction, for Trello just keeps on increasing!
TLDR: No. It’s less than even the quarterly VC investment rate in Europe.
There was a bit of chatter in the London startup investor community recently about the welcome increase in amount of funds being raised.
I remember Jon Bradford specifically mentioning close to a £1 Billion raised in a few months by 9 funds. There was a bit of a flutter around the group when JD mentioned the figure at #fplive – people wondering if all the money could even be deployed in the relatively nascent European / London tech startup ecosystem. Someone may even have mentioned valuation bubble, or some such gobbledygook.
Take a quick look at this chart from Dow Jones (source):
Click to view full image.
Last quarter VCs invested €2.4 B (~£1.8B) in European companies. At an investment run-rate of £1.8 B a quarter, and increasing, that £1 B raise in a quarter doesn’t look that big anymore.
There will be some additional liquidity from investment exits[1] – IPOs and acquisitions. But given the relatively young ecosystem in Europe – most maturing, successful European startups move(d) to the US for better valuation & operating environments – there can’t be too many exits providing the rest of liquidity.
Makes me wonder the other side now: If this £1 B raise is such a big deal, where has the VC funding been coming in from so far? We’ve been above a quarterly £1 B quarterly investing rate for over 6 quarters now. US VCs investing in Europe without direct presence?[2]
Either way, that £1 Billion figure doesn’t look as big as it sounded first up. And we really do need more of them, more frequently.
Trello, probably my favourite software out there, implemented an awesome new feature today – unlimited labels. Before today, users were restricted to the 6 system defined labels. We could rename them to what they meant for us, but couldn’t add new ones. This handicap was removed today.
Thanks for the unlimited labels, team Trello!
However, this upgrade also breaks a very useful keyboard ui pattern.
Earlier, I could press L (shortcut for label interface), followed by digits (codes) of all the labels I wanted added, and be done with labeling a card in one go.
Now, I need to press L, followed by label digit, followed by enter, for each label separately. Adding 3 labels to a card went from 5 key strokes to 9 strokes. Makes it harder, tiresome.
I understand the need to break the earlier pattern because of the possibility of double digit label numbers. These would make it impossible to decipher if L13 meant apply labels 1 & 3, or apply label 13.
My suggested alternative: reduce the number of custom labels from UNLIMITED to 26. Then you can use alphabets as codes for custom labels. Now L1C could mean apply labels 1 & C, while L13 would continue to mean apply label 1 & 3.
I hope 26+6 labels would be sufficient for most use cases though the teams at Trello would have better data to check the hypothesis.
Would love to hear views of Trello UX, design teams.
Solve hard technical problem for ONE obvious business opportunity (e.g. image recognition solution for construction industry). Better than solving an easy technical problem in a crowded marketplace (a messenger app).
Fight to your strength, defend your weaknesses – anonymous
So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak. – Someone
What Matt and that someone are saying are perfectly in sync.
Matt, via Entrepreneur First, recruits young technical wizards, and equips them with business skills and support to help them launch exciting startups. By the definition of their recruitment filter, they attract people whose strength lies in solving hard technical problems, and who may have weaknesses in other areas – marketing skills to fight for growth and traction in crowded markets, for instance. For such teams, it makes obvious business sense to go after problems that are hard to solve technically, but (relatively) easy to sell to market. And thus, the insightful, powerful statement by Matt.
However. The statement isn’t the final truth for everyone. Following the second set of quotes above, you need to fight on ground that enhances your strengths, and hides your weaknesses, best. If you’re an excellent marketing & sales driver growth hacker, with possibly a good designer and an adequate developer for company, you might want to pick problems that are easy to solve technically, but in a big, vibrant (likely crowded) market – diametrically opposite to what Matt suggested.
And if you start succeeding, you’ll be well advised to acquire/acquihire/poach some of the graduates of Matt’s EF program :)
How many white males does it take to lead and support a tech cluster?
Based on 2 recent power lists – as many as you can get in!
Both the lists are packed with white males, with little to no representation from many minority-gender groups. I’m not criticising the lists here, but taking them as a reflection of the state of our tech ecosystem. We have far to go…
Business Insider’s list of coolest 50 people in UK tech [Source]
Click to see full image
39 of the 52(!) people on the list are white males.
There are ZERO, by my quick calculation, black men or women on the list.
There are just 8 women, in total.
Only 2non-white women,Eileen Burbidge and Bindi Karia, grace the list.
There are few people – male or female – more highly deserving of their spot on the list, but I’m surprised that there are *just* 2!
2 black males – Chuka Umunna and Samuel Kasumu – make the list this time. No black/origin females, sadly.
Only 9 out of 100 people on the list are non-white.
Considering this list is more about thinkers and influencers – it has David Cameron at #1 – than about do-ers, the lack of diversity surprises me even more. I’m sure there are lots of non-white women and men leading, encouraging, and influencing fresh business thought in the UK tech and business communities.
I may be wrong. In which case, there simply need to be more. A lot more. In my humble opinion.
Summarising what I’ve been tweeting about my early impressions of Inbox.
First impression
Started off being surprised by the app speed, both on the laptop and Nexus 5. The Gmail app had become laggy on the N5 recently, and has been slow for a long while on the web. Inbox was pleasantly, surprisingly fast. (Aside: Gmail on N5 may be slow because of the amount of email that I’ve marked for offline storage. No such setting in Inbox).
Getting used to the new sorting concept takes a little effort. While I’ve been using, and loving, Gmail’s automatic labels, they were always hidden away from the view in the main Gmail apps. In Inbox, by default, they’re right there on the main screen, with older email from the primary inbox shoved further down. This can, and needs, to be fine tuned for each user’s taste, but I wonder how many regular users will know how to, or even bother?
Second impression
After more fiddling around with Inbox: I like it on the phone. It’s fast, it’s clean, and gets right to business. On the PC, I still prefer the good old Gmail. Mainly because I’m over dependent on keyboard shortcuts for everything – actions and traversal – which Inbox doesn’t support very well yet.
Another observation – people like me who delete unwanted emails, instead of archiving them, might have a few OCD issues with using Inbox. The default ‘mark-it-done’ action just archives the email. Doesn’t even mark it read before archiving. Very bad for my inbox hygiene OCD.
Aside
Inbox feels like a great tool for people who get large volumes of email. Those with fewer mails may find it an unnecessary complication of the simpler Gmail client.
Which makes me wonder, is the Google Inbox a product that answers the need of valley/tech users, or did Google actually research ALL its Gmail users’ behaviour?
Treatment of email inbox as a to-do list, and focus on quickly dealing with larger volumes of email, shows Google is trying to respond to the chatter around ’email overload’ and ‘disrupting email’, and building up on work that apps like Mailbox are already doing.
My worry is are the chatterati who this app responds to really that big a target market1, or could Google be ignoring the silent masses? The pickup of Inbox, and continuing development of default Gmail app might help answer these questions.
I abandoned the Inbox web app on laptop after the first night. It’s become my default app on the N5, though. The UI of the Android app still feels a bit broken, though.
The first big negative, for me, was discovering that we can’t share links (using Android’s share intents) in emails using the Inbox app. The default Gmail app allows this nicely. It’s sad that Inbox had to break this link sharing facility – can’t add articles directly from newsletters to Pocket anymore, and so can’t quickly mark them done! :(
Another UI fail that slows me down quite a bit: Can’t quickly run through emails by swiping right-left from an open email to next-previous email. This swipe-traversal made quickly running through the updates folder so easy in the Gmail app – start at first email, and quickly read through all before archiving/deleting them all. Doing the same in Inbox app, requires a lot more tap actions!
A final, small hiccup – In the Gmail app, users could save any attached photos directly to Google Drive. This too seems to have been broken in the Inbox app.
Summary
I like the direction Google has taken with the Inbox app. It may not suit all Gmail users, but for those like me who get a lot of email (and are willing to tune the app to their needs), it’s perfect. It also helps that it isn’t replacing the original Gmail app, which may still be a better option for a lot of users. There are still quite a few UI gaps, which I hope will get filled quickly since the app is still in its early roll out phase.
