I’ve been trying to being to improve my Angular skills and build a simple Kanban data visualiser in the process. I did this because I could see there are several Kanban-style solutions out there and most of those are related to task management.
Kanban has become widely accepted as a way to share the status of tasks thanks to its simple and effective visual impact. It turns out that Kanban is indeed a useful way to visualise and manipulate information. For example, if I have a bunch of tasks that each have a status and a priority, the standard Kanban model will allow me to move tasks through statuses “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done”. What I can’t do is juggle the priorities quite so easily unless I edit each individual card. So why not let me view my Kanban board by priority and move tasks around by priority too?
Airtable have clearly realised this and offer a Kanban view along with a grid, calendar and gallery (image-based) view so my thinking is not entirely original. With this in mind, I’m just trying to experiment and see if I can build a lightweight client-heavy visualisation tool to do this.
Kanban works, some of the time
It takes longer than you think so nothing new there.
Only certain data works in kanban format. Really, this means data where categorisation is obvious, such as items with priorities or statuses attached. On any particular set of data there may be only one or two candidates for sensible kanban-isation, and sometimes none at all.
Kanban is not just for task organisation. As it becomes a more familiar way to organise data, it makes sense to also use it as a way to be able to slice and dice data. Spreadsheet-style grids have become ubiquitous, because they afford easy recognition, although sometimes this comes at the expense of being quite cumbersome for the data concerned.
Kanban alone is not enough, unfortunately. Airtable realised this too (except they actually started with a grid). Calendars, image galleries, grids and lists are all useful ways to look at data and Airtable have decent implementations of each of those.
Whether to continue or not
I’m not sure if there is any commercial value in this. There are plenty of similar offerings out there if you are willing to put some effort into structuring your data. Personally, I’m a little overwhelmed by the options, but you can check out my app on GitHub (live demo pending).
In my experience, people want solutions to their specific problems. They don’t want to have to learn something new unless they really have to. If they are using a spreadsheet and they are struggling, it has to get really bad before they make the jump. The risk and cognitive load involved in learning new paradigms makes this understandable. This means that using Kanban as a way to slice and dice and reorganise data has some barriers to widespread adoption in the near term.
After all, it did take a few decades for the Kanban concept to make its way from Toyota’s factory floors to the whiteboards and desktops of the tech world. For task organisation it now needs little explanation. For the purpose of organising more varied data, where I believe there is potential, it may take more time and clearer explanations than what I am able to provide here.