The New Board Thumbnail System is a Step Backwards

  • 27 January 2023
  • 2 replies
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Howdy - I try not to foment negativity, but I strongly feel that the new Thumbnail feature for boards is a step backwards. When I’m navigating multiple boards across a project, I am visually scanning the custom thumbnail snapshots I’ve created as an indicator of the board contents. While it’s tedious to perform this preview area action, I’ve baked it into my muscle memory when creating and maintaining boards. For the volume of boards created it’s an essential step in upkeep and historical navigation.

The ideal scenario would be a team-wide setting to enable automated, scheduled board content screenshots to create thumbnails, bypassing the need for preview areas to be manually selected. Something more closely approaching real-time visibility into board contents.

The reason I say this new Thumbnail interface is a step backwards is that more actions have been introduced between the user and the act of capturing preview areas, in service of thumbnails that provide little utility in distinguishing one board from another. “Select Preview Area” is no longer a single click - I now need to click “Change thumbnail”, scroll to the bottom of the icons, then click “Select board area”. A scroll and a click has been added to a process that would significantly benefit from automating beyond manual upkeep.

This speaks to a larger friction I feel within the platform, the elegance of the experience working within a board paired with the leaden lift of navigating the board directory. I don’t like bitching and moaning without some actionable path forward, but I feel strongly about this and wanted to vocalize.


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@Kyle Chipman - Agreed -- these extra steps are tedious! I find it somewhat disappointing to see new features like this being worked on when there are so many other things I would find valuable as a consumer of the product.

Like... the management of boards and projects, e.g., drag projects into a folder vs. click-move-click-click-scroll-click-click. And I would like the ability to select multiple boards to complete an action on from the dashboard, e.g., move/delete/add to project. Those are just a few examples I can think of as I pause a movie to reply to this post.

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I’m curious to hear what movie you were watching. I just took a break from playing an infinite rocket launcher save for resident evil 4. It’s still such a  great game (don’t know if / when I’ll play the remake).

 

Totally in agreement with the points you raised. They touch on two fundamental approaches / considerations:

 

- the experience of navigating a board directory as an extension of working within a board

- the ability to manage batch changes across boards

 

I return to the word Elegance when reflecting on these considerations. This is still the first word I think of when considering the in-board experience 

 

It feels like there actionable paths forward for us to ideate, but I’ve committed myself to other efforts for at least the next half year and am already at risk of overextension. When I’m in the clear it would be fun to conceptualize in a board and expand the thinking in this thread.

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