Taskade Doesn’t Want You to Be Alone.

Lately, I’ve been reevaluating my task management workflow and have been intrigued by the Taskade team’s improvements.

I’m currently using a mixture of Notion and TickTick, and while they’re both excellent and powerful tools on their own, it’s frustrating to have to bounce between them.

Taskade has some slick features that I really enjoy:

1. Their killer feature is their Chrome plugin. You can load your last project on every new tab. I use this to keep a scratchpad of notes that opens on all of my devices. I can turn these into actionable items, a checklist, anything I want to do. It’s fantastic.
2. Calendar Sync without needing any add-ons/extensions/accounts on 3rd party websites. It’s one-way calendar sync, but it still gets the job done.
3. A full-featured reminder system that sends emails to my devices. It’s mind-boggling that Notion still hasn’t figured this out.
4. A fantastic sorting system that I find myself using a lot. No more Googling “List Alphabetizer Tool.”

If you try using Notion with a New Tab Extension, the performance is awful, and you get a blank white flash every new tab.

Taskade works as an outstanding balance of power and simplicity, but I find one overarching problem: Taskade is constantly assuming two things:

• You are always creating tasks.
• You are collaborating with several groups of people.

A cursory look at Taskade’s UI shows several prime real estate spots waiting for you to add multiple workspaces and to share the document you’re currently working on with coworkers or friends.

My avatar is shown here four times for some reason, and clicking it does different things depending on which one you use

The left-hand sidebar of the main dashboard is a prime example of wasted space. The four main buttons are as follows:

1. The first instance of my avatar functioning as a “Home/Dashboard” button.
2. “Shared with Me”
3. My “Jamie” Workspace
4. “Add a Workspace.”

A user working with one workspace doesn’t need any of these buttons. We could combine the Home Dashboard and Jamie Workspace buttons.

I’d argue that the primary left sidebar could be removed entirely for individual users and replaced with the secondary left sidebar. Every button being displayed there is unnecessary.

The main dashboard has a very poorly designed left-hand sidebar that assumes I’m going to have many workspaces. Even if I did, it would be pretty easy to display them as toggles, similar to what Notion does. Making much better use of space:

Notion only makes me look at my face once

Here’s a photo bash mock-up of what a better dashboard would look like:

The left hand side bar should be collapsible here

I eliminated the outer left-hand bar, and upon looking at the secondary left-hand bar, the options were Home, Search, Activity. Home is redundant as clicking our username in the top left takes us there. We can relocate the search function to the top right (or bottom left if you wanted to), and the bell in the top right duplicates activity.

These changes give us a blank slate, pretty much, so I added starred projects at the top (as I’m unsure what that even does now), and then we can have a mini version of the recent projects page there on the left. I’d argue that this view would even be better for users working on multiple projects if you wanted to add the primary workplace switcher sidebar on the left-hand side.

My face is shown a dozen times here

The theme of poorly used space and forced collaboration is carried over when you go into an individual project page. A staggering 100 pixels of prime top screen real estate is wholly wasted assuming that I want to collaborate with people. Even if I eventually want to, I probably want to start by myself and work my way up to that.

There’s a confusing call/chat sidebar that is expanded by default which seems to replicate the project history button above. So it’s not too bad when it’s collapsed, which should be the default state until somebody else collaborates on the project.

Here’s a quick photo bash mock-up of what the project page could be:

I finally have room to breathe, I mean.. write..

The left-hand “Jamie” project being outside of the top hamburger menu isn’t helpful at all, and I’m not sure if a new button is needed, but I kept it there in the top left.

I removed the collaborate icon up at the top and recommend moving that UI to the brand new chat/collaboration box, which I have collapsed.

I relocated the activity bell and the profile menu to the bottom left because they don’t feel specific to the project you’re on, so it doesn’t make sense from a hierarchy standpoint to have them up there. I feel like moving the display type (List/Board/Action) makes sense to have inside the document space since it directly interacts with it. That leaves the history and overflow buttons there.

We save all the space to let the document shine, which is the primary element of this page, after all.

I also moved the due date/assign/tag to the top right. I’d argue for hiding/collapse these by default. I think “Assign” could easily be implemented in the one chat/collab box to rule them all.

All in all, we save about 150 pixels of prime real estate this way!

When working on tools that have multiple personas, it’s critical for both Product Managers and UX/UI Designers to be mindful of each. It’s easy to get blinders on and only focus on your paying enterprise customers. But one of the best ways for a freemium piece of software like Taskade to attract new happy customers is by evangelizing them as personal users and getting them to want to use it at work. This is what beloved tools like Slack, Asana, Stripe and others do very well.