Friday, August 26, 2011

Review: tadalist – Simple and Well Designed Little Todo Management Web App

tadalist is a very simple web based todo manager that allows you to create lists with tasks and check them off when done.

screenshot tadalist - review web based todo management tool

Feature Set: Focus on Todo Management Simplicity

The concept of tadalist is straightforward: Todos are grouped into lists. Thats almost it:

  • change order within list: you can drag and drop todos
  • edit and delete todos
  • mark todos as done
  • share lists with others either via a link (non-editable) or via email (permission to edit the list)
  • rss feed for lists and todos

There is really nothing distracting you from creating and working with your todos. However the tool is primarily aimed for personal use and offers little or no flexibility when trying to filter todos via tags, importance or other properties.

Feature Rating: 1/5

Design and Usability: Great Flow and Details

One of the Design Commandments by famous product designer Dieter Rams says:

“Good design is as little design as possible.”

Tadalist pretty much nails this one on the head. Nothing distracts you from creating and working with your todos.

Even more: The user flow for creating todos is almost impecible. It is fast, you can create them with as little clicks as possbile, as many as you want at a time.

Little details make your todo decisions a little bit easier: The more todos a list contains, the larger the little circle in front of it gets.

Design Rating: 4/5

Overall Impression: Good Design but too Few Featueres

Even though I really enjoyed the flow of tadalist, for real work or even real todo management, tadalist has too little to offer. Once you get past 4 or 5 lists with more then 10 todos in each, filtering, prioritizing and a better interaction view become necessary, in my opinion. For real collaboration features such as assigning tasks seem useful but not implemented in tadalist.

Overall Rating: 2/5