We’re starting to give Timeline View some love. This is how we want to support hierarchy in a Timeline View. Thoughts?
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Looks pretty nice at first glance. Only thing I can think of is just the same issues that exist related to Many-to-many relationships should be usable for levels in lists. It works cleanly in that example, but teams might have a very different structure used for project management that won’t be easily presented with these limitations. It seems like this approach breaks down any time there is a shared level somewhere along the lines.
For example, what if I have a common set of concerns across projects that we always want to organize the projects by, which is a pattern we have used in the past using Roadmunk. This could be something like Design, Engineering, Marketing, Testing, and Analysis. For each project, you might want to organize the tasks associated with these common types of activities. Or, you might want to start with these activities, then show the projects, then the tasks. The strict hierarchical nature of this feature greatly limits flexibility and adds a lot of modeling overhead to try to work around.
I’d also like to see Improve Timeline Readability addressed at some point, but I understand this is a more focused feature. At the moment there is such limited ability to display real-world data effectively that it doesn’t matter if there is hierarchy or not.
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This is in plans for sure. Many good things will happen with Timeline View in the next few months.
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Played around a bit more with the current timeline view. It does appear that it supports collections, so I think the proposed approach would potentially reduce the flexibility of the current view. While there are benefits to leveraging the common levels functionality between all these different features, I imagine you might have some people not happy that they can’t create the same visualizations as before.
For example, I took the product management app, added an Employees type so i could make up my own employees and related them to features and epics as collections. This shows how i can have a single item (Addictive Feed) show up in the view multiple times, but I think that still isn’t possible with the levels hierarchy functionality.
I want to keep backward compatibility, so the new Timeline view will definitely bring many-to-many support in hierarchical views (List and Smart Folders).
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Great, I’m excited for the changes. I think that will greatly improve the flexibility of everything leveraging that hierarchy/grouping functionality.