Trello moved 'Facelift' card to Completed on Go Live board

New views, card types, and branding as 10th anniversary nears

Australian dev tools supplier Atlassian has unveiled a new look and new views for its Kanban-bothering application, Trello.

The update is accompanied by a refresh of Trello's branding and logo, which is a little more business-like, and resists the urge to ape the multicolour imagery beloved by other tech giants.

New toys on offer, branding aside, are new ways of visualising data in Trello. A Timeline view allows the grouping of cards in lanes by list, label, or member to track a team's pipeline in a visualisation that put us a little in mind of project plans of old. The Table view pulls in cards from selected boards to present data in a list reminiscent of a spreadsheet. The Dashboard view is aimed at "the big picture" and starts with four charts (cards per list, cards per member, cards per label, and cards per due date status) that can then be customised. Finally, a Calendar view presents data in something that looks for all the world like a To-Do list.

Customers who have bought into the Trello way of working will, however, need to have signed up to either the Business Class or Enterprise tiers to use the new views. The Free tier does not have access.

The company has faced a bit of a quandary over recent years as the core Trello product has begun to look distinctly long in the tooth even as Atlassian continued to report impressive revenue growth ($501.4m for Q2 of FY2021 compared to the $408.7m for the same period in 2020).

The Register spoke to Trello co-founder Michael Pryor back in September. He told us that one pain point identified by the team was visibility over increasingly busy Trello boards, but he warned that loading up on features could turn off customers "because now the software is too complicated to use."

The results of the company's deliberations are now on show. As well as the update views, a new sidebar to help with navigation and new card types have been added for all users, including Link cards (making use of a URL for external tools) and Board cards (which link to other boards). The team will also be opening up the Views platform to third parties.

Trello's update will go some way to fending off competition from the likes of Asana as the product nears its 10th anniversary. The company faces a difficult balancing act as it attempts to turn on the feature hose without sacrificing the simplicity of years past. ®