[DONE] Improve Timeline Readability

I have played around with the Timeline view some and think it could use at least one important update to greatly improve the utility of it.

Currently, the timeline view always puts the text of the entity inside the element that is shown on the timeline for it. This almost never works out well for a roadmap that is going to be viewed at varying levels of date granularity, and every roadmapping tool I’ve come across provides an option to put the text outside the element.

For example, here is an excerpt of a roadmap we have in Roadmunk:

If this was in Fibery, it would say “Critical Po…” instead of “Critical Post Release Bugs” and “Opti…” instead of “Optimize Filter Bar”. If product teams are going to use Fibery for managing roadmaps, then the roadmaps need to be more readable without direct interaction. Many of our roadmaps we’ll take screenshots of and share them in meeting slides, which just wouldn’t be an effective use case at the moment.

Notion recently released a timeline view and they have a different solution of greying out the text that overflows the element, but not sure how well this works in practice.

Truncated text in current Timeline view:

More Options for Improving Readability:

  • Allow customizing the view to increase the height of the element to at least 2 lines
  • Minimize the padding a bit within the element
  • Adjust the font size up or down
  • Improve the display when you are showing more than just the name of the entity (See screenshot below)

Showing multiple points of information in Fibery:

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@rothnic this is great, I am feeling that we have very similar needs from Fibery!

Could you have a look at this link:

You’ll see links to three very similar requests around word wrap limitations in Timelines, and also the whole post that link is in has some good stuff related to what you are referring to in timeline. I encourage you to “heart” away on those requests, as apparently that will increase the value of those features in the Fibery backlog, although as @Oshyan and I have discussed, the Fibery team has not come out and explained clearly how they count requests here in the forum. For example, to “hearts” on the initial post get all the value, or do responses with hearts also count?

Also, curious about your thoughts here:

And the related:

Having a secondary date on a timeline is very useful. It’s well done in Zenkit:

and your Roadmunk example is also a nice illustration of how bespoke timelines are a must in Product Development. And since Fibery is going big here, we could really use improved Timelines.

Finally, this is also a must in my book for Timelines:

Sadly, I have zero support on that one, but I remain in bad need of dependency handling in Fibery. Talk about a basic functionality in Product Development and Task Management. And something most other quality apps have with often advanced feature sets.

Cheers!

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It will be very helpful to have a horizontal scroll bar in the timeline view.

The “Today” button centers the timeline with today in the center of the displayed timeline.
When I select the display scale as “Months” all the tasks on the timeline is from the center of the timeline view to the right with the “Today” vertical line in the center of the view.

With a horizontal scroll bar it will be possible to stay in the month scale and scroll the timeline display so that the tasks starts on the left and uses the whole timeline display to display tasks for about 30 months ahead and not only 15 months ahead from the center of the timeline view.

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In Windows, while holding down Shift, using the mouse wheel scrolls horizontally.

Hoping to amplify this feature request here! As a product manager, I would love to use Timeline views in my meetings with my stakeholders. The shortcomings noted above are inhibitors for this. I am NOT advocating for advanced Gantt chart capabilities. Rather, product managers want to be able to configure Timeline views to maximize screen real estate and readability of each object (Roadmunk’s choice to lay text on top of each horizontal line seems a reasonable solution).

Another nice to have feature would let me define the default time parameter of a Timeline view so that I can focus visibility on WIP and the upcoming 1-2 quarters.

On that note, an option to view the timeline in Quarterly increments would be a quick and important win for us.

An outcome to consider is to enable Product Managers to avoid having to build powerpoint views of timelines (roadmaps) in order to communicate info that is already in Fibery. I don’t mind taking a screenshot of Fibery for a powerpoint slide or email but I shouldn’t have to rebuild a timeline outside of Fibery. Thank you.

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This might be the wrong thread for this, but another timeline feature I’d love is an option for summary bars for the lanes.


Milestones are nice, but when you have a lot of lanes, too many vertical lines can get confusing. Example: I have Projects as lanes on a Staffing timeline, it would be great to have the Project’s duration show on the timeline above those Staffing cards as a “summary” bar.

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I have a related request (or perhaps i am just missing something). it would be great to have multiple milestones within a single timeline. Specifically, i am creating timelines for individual projects. the timeline represents the phases within the project. i would like the timeline to include multiple dates (related to the project not the phase) such as an Issue for Permit date, Construction Start date and Est Completion date

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I would like to see the same as well, and posted a related request here, what do you think of it:

You should create a database (called Milestone perhaps) with a date field, and then link this to the Project db (one project → many milestones).
The Project’s Milestones can be added to any timeline view.

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Great suggestions from the author. I hope the Fibery team will take it soon.

I would like to share my workaround for this problem. For “Feature” or another entity with start and end dates you can create an extra field Planned End Extended with the formula Planned.End() + Days(Length(Name) * 3). You can play and try to use another multiplier for Feature Name Length. As a result, you can use 2 timeline views:

  1. with original start and end dates
  2. with an original start date and new field Planned End Extended

For me and my team, a huge problem is that fields are not shown, if the timeline bar’s end is not visible.

The fields we choose to show contain important information - the fields should always be visible.

Fields should be shown right-justified if the timeline continues out of view.

The name of the entity moves along with the current field of view - it jumps to the left if you scroll, etc. Why can’t the fields do the same? This would be a great help and overall improvement for the timeline view.

Name updates, field disappears


Another example of fields disappearing:

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Hello, I began using Fibery at the recommendation of my teacher. However, I find it annoying to use Timeline. Is there no horizontal scrollbar to scroll horizontally? By using middle-mouse click or Alt-click, the responsiveness is poor in Edge, which is my browser of choice. I would request a scrollbar, at least as an option. This should be a no brainer, really. The app could be more accessible in many other regards. I will be sure to share my thoughts.

Swapping blocks in the timeline is also pretty clumsy in my view, the blocks go where I expect they should 15% of the time. There is a little offset, which makes them unpredictable. I guess I’ll get used to, but it should be clear through a sort of “shadow” in the UI where the block will snap into before you release it, or it should be done differently altogether. This is unnecessary friction.

Otherwise, the idea for your app is great. I really like it and just wish it was more friendly to users.

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On Windows when you hold Shift the mouse wheel scrolls horizontally (everywhere).

And yes, there is still lots of room for improvement with Fibery’s UI/UX.

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We are just now starting to get more of our organization using Fibery, and just wanted to bump this over 2 year old issue. Any new user is going to compare fibery to notion, coda, asana etc and pretty much every tool out there has a more usable timeline view. IMHO, a usable timeline view for a project management tool is simply table stakes.

I really want to migrate our whole content team that is using Asana to Fibery, but it is kind of embarrassing to show the equivalent views they’d be using instead.

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We will take Timeline View into redesign after Table View replacement, I hope it will happen in Feb 2024 (not a promise).

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We are working on that now. Main idea is to add “one entity per line” mode and it will help us to show text

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This is fantastic news! A “one entity per line” mode is a huge step towards a gantt chart. Are there any plans to have a fields column on the left side where you can edit information in a central location rather than having to show everything on the entity card?

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Some improvements released today

After today’s release we consider this feature done

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