An important aspect of any production management software is task assignation. It’s a feature that was missing in Kitsu, the web gui of the CGWire suite. Fortunately it’s an addition in of the latest release! I did my best to keep it simple and efficient. For that, I used a kind of mode. When a task is selected in the asset/shost validation list, an action bar is displayed and it is possible to assign / unassign tasks.
Let’s see a little video to show you how I handled it:
I think it looks good, the colors especially, but I’m a little unsure of whether it’s a good idea to split the task and assignee so far from each other visually. Even in this short video, I find myself looking back and forth between which tasks were selected, and who I’m actually assigning to.
Have you considered listing artists on one side, and allowing for drag and dropping artist-to-task? Maybe you could even keep the multi-selection thingy, which I think is great, where dropping on a multi-select assigns to all selected.
Its looks like you are tagging the tasks with different things. What is TODO?
I would maybe be a little confused as a first time user when seeing these tags. If you don’t know when who/what is FR.
I have seen this done as a spreadsheet in other production managers, so you basically have a column called Assignee where you see the full name of people assigned to the task.
@flavio Shif click doesn’t work but it’s something that I would like to add soon.
@tokejepsen TODO is To-do. Are you sure it’s not English? What better term do you suggest?
@marcus Thank you for remark and your suggestion. Currently I can’t afford to do big changes, but I keep it in mind for future changes. Another thing to keep in mind is that I want to keep the UI tablet friendly (though I still have some responsive improvement to do).
I can see the use for that. Having one interface work on both desktop and tablets reduce your labour by a factor of 2. However, personally, I would rather interact with an interface tailored for the desktop when I’m on the desktop, and a touch-interface when I’m on something like my phone. There’s nothing more frustrating (to me personally, this may vary) than running software on my computer that was designed for a phone (or vice versa) like websites with huge fonts and lots of wasted space (not saying this app is).
I would suggest either focus on one, or split the task into two, like e.g. Asana. They have one desktop interface, and another for mobile. Mobile is a limited subset that is relevant for touch and you don’t need as much detail nor control. Realistically, due to time constraints, focusing on one is likely a better option. Then it’s a matter of finding where most of your userbase are; on their phone or desktop.
You’re right, it’s another temptation to lose focus. It’s something I must be careful with.
About the tablets, I really mean tablets, not phone. Production Managers run a lot across a studio. Accessing to information through a phone is not comfortable, and they cannot move easily their laptop. Tablets are a good compromise to keep access to production data while moving from CG Artist to CG Artist.
