Swimlane Beta User Interview with ClickUp

Credit: clickup.com

Yesterday (2022/10/12), I had a beta user interview with ClickUp. It was a great experience. Their PM asked me many questions about our scenarios and we talked a lot. The most important thing is that I knew they will fix some major issues finally. Frankly, I am almost going to give up ClickUp and switch back to Jira Cloud. I even left a reply on Canny before they announced the beta:

Let me do the recap and intro.

What is ClickUp? It is an all-in-one SaaS management tool but we only use it as our task management tool for our Scrum.

We were used to use Jira for tracking our tickets. But back to the beginning of this year, we have some new Web3 products and some of our teammates were tired of the lagging of Jira Cloud. So, they proposed to use ClickUp and I agreed with them to use it as PoC for new products during that time.

But soon, I noticed that ClickUp has some major weak points to do the management compares to Jira. Although they developed the beta version of swimlane after almost 4 years of the first proposal, they still need much time to improve them.

Hence, if you want to run Scrum, Jira might still be your first choice at this moment. (Even though Jira Cloud is really quite slow.) But don't get me wrong, I truly hope that ClickUp can accelerate their development speed and fix the pain points of management views then competing with Jira.

I listed the major weak points as below and you can make them as your checkpoints if the team figure them out,

• No swimlanes and No "Group by User Story". 
• Forced users to focus one task at a time.
• They separate their calendar by each month.

More about the issues:

No swimlanes and No "Group by User Story"

Without swimlanes and "Group by User Story" will make you feel helpless and the board is useless when you are in your "standup (or sync) meeting". If ClickUp has swimlanes and the tickets can be grouped by user story, it will be very easy to acknowledge the current status of the user stories. You only have to focus on the swimlanes to make sure the user stories have been DONE or ACCEPTED.

Forced users to focus one task at a time

When you want to see the details of one specific task, ClickUp will open a giant window and make you focus on this task. Then you can not switch to another ticket or take a glance at them at the same time. It's not a good design for a manager but a developer (executor).

They separate their calendar by each month

We won't separate our project plans or milestones by month, the calendar view shouldn't do that as well. They should allow users to scroll the calendar but not using the option switcher.

Updates

Although Jira has a higher learning curve and requires more effort to operate, the high flexibility of JQL combined with the comprehensiveness of its automation processes make it difficult to leave the comfort zone made by Jira. This is especially true considering the recent improvements they have made (as of 2023/04/09) which have significantly increased its speed.