ForumsNewsToodledo Redesign - July 2011

Today we are revealing our third major redesign in our five years of existence. We hired our friends at ZURB to help make it possible, and we think that it looks really good.



A lot has changed, and it may take a little getting used to. We have thought very hard about each aspect of the new design, and we are confident that Toodledo is now more efficient and more intuitive than it was before, which is what you want from a productivity tool.

We had three criteria that we kept in mind when redesigning Toodledo.com.

1) Improve the look and feel and bring Toodledo into the modern era with a professional design that didn't look like it was made by engineers (I'm an engineer, so I can say that).

2) Streamline the user interface to reduce clutter and complexity.

3) Avoid increasing the "cost" of commonly used actions. We are defining the word "cost" to mean the amount of time or number of clicks that it takes to perform an action. For example, completing a task has a cost of "1 click" on the checkbox.

If you consider it for a minute, you'll realize that #2 and #3 are at odds with each other. Reducing clutter and complexity will probably entail hiding some features that were previously exposed, which will increase the cost of those actions. We carefully weighed each element of our website and only made cost compromises when it was backed up by statistics or by making other improvements possible.

We realize that you have spent a lot of time getting familiar with the way Toodledo works, and that this redesign may make you slower while you re-learn your work patterns. Please give yourself some time to become accustomed to the new workflow. We believe that with a little reacquaintance time, you will be more efficient and productive. We know that there will be a small percentage of people who dislike our new design. This is inevitable, but we are hoping that two things will help minimize the number of people in this group.


1) Our old design was really bad. [see screenshot above] The new design is such a huge leap forwards, that I hope people will appreciate it more than if we were just "rearranging the furniture" for the novelty of it.

2) Later in this post, I am going to go point-by-point and explain each of our design decisions. My hope is to make it clear that we did not make any change without thoroughly thinking it through with good data to back it up. If you feel like actions are slower than before, please read the section at the end of this post to see why we did certain things.

People have been asking for a modern design for years, and we are very happy to finally have something to show for it. This redesign primarily focused on the home page, navigation, toolbars and notebook section. There is still more work to do over the coming months to improve the design of secondary pages, and to the display and management of individual tasks. So we aren't completely done, but we are well on our way.

Thanks,
Jake

For a complete step by step justification of each design decision, please Read Here.