When faced with a complex project that requires multiple skill sets, it’s always a good idea to look for help. Teams that can split up their work and utilize each member’s skills efficiently work fast and deliver great results. But it’s not always easy to delegate tasks – there may be confusion as to the scope of roles and delivery dates, or it may even be hard to find out which team members are best suited to which task.
Todofeed aims to solve that problem with a simple app that helps you get everyone on the same page and get cracking on your next project fast. But does it have enough to offer? Let’s take on a project and find out.
Overview
Todofeed is a new app that we briefly covered earlier in our Quick Look series. It’s a free service that you can use to get things done in a team, socially. You can create projects, list and describe tasks that need to be completed and allow co-workers, friends and/or family to take them up.
Todofeed allows users to comment on tasks and will also notify participants of events (such as someone signing up for a task, updates on task information and more) by email. It doesn’t do much else, though – so if you have a large project and need to track task progress and share files, Todofeed may not be for you. However, if you’re organizing a community project where you just need people to take ownership of tasks and manage themselves, this could be the service you’ve been looking for.
TODOFeed's Homepage
Getting started
Todofeed is free to use, so after going through the painless registration process you can create a project (called a Planning) and describe it for those in the dark. You can then start adding tasks that need to be taken up and completed by participants to successfully finish the project. Once you’ve set it all up you can start inviting participants who’re on Todofeed or from your Facebook/Hotmail accounts to take up tasks. Support for inviting contacts from Gmail and Yahoo! is in the pipeline and should be running soon.
Signup quickly with your info or your Facebook account
User interface
The Todofeed interface consists of a dashboard, a Plannings section and account settings. These can all be accessed from the fixed orange bar at the top of the screen. There’s also a link to a Requests section but that doesn’t seem to be working just yet. This is one of many niggles still present in the app, alongside GUI issues like shifty buttons, stretched images, incorrectly spaced text and an archaic Lastname Firstname naming convention for users.
On the dashboard you can see an activity feed that shows what your teammates have been up to. This includes people joining projects, taking up or changing tasks. There isn’t a filter to toggle display of activity from particular projects so it might get messy when you have a number of projects running at once.
The Plannings tab features an overview of projects that you have running, indicating tasks yet to be claimed and the date by which they’ve to be claimed. You can also create a new planning on this page by entering a planning name, a date by which tasks have to be claimed and a description. In my simulated use cases, I didn’t find the claim-by date to be important – I’d rather have the project completion date highlighted instead.
Creating a new planning
After creating a new planning you can start to add tasks within it by adding a task name, a description and indicating whether it’s for one or multiple persons to handle. You can then invite participants and allow them to view the planning and task details and take up tasks. As a participant you can also change your mind later, ditch a task and choose another one at any point.
Using Todofeed
Todofeed is geared towards beginners and is best suited to informal projects and activities, like organizing parties, study groups, road trips, etc. It’s great for when you simply need people to know who’s in charge of which tasks and is easier than sifting through long group email conversations to achieve the same thing. However, when I created a planning to build an online storefront which would need branding, copywriting, warehousing, design, database management and backend coding, I felt like I wish I could do more with this app.
For example, I’d like to be able to comment on individual tasks after they’ve been claimed, add checklists to tasks for participants to tick off as they finish sub-tasks, and generally manage timelines. Similarly, it’d be great to be able to invite people to take up only certain tasks, share files and message participants privately. It’s not clear why Todofeed is as low on features as it is, and it leaves one feeling like the app could do with more features.
A typical planning: not much you can do
Conclusion
Todofeed currently looks and feels like only the beginning of a great app. It still needs a lot of work before it can be taken seriously, including a number of bugs and UI issues that need fixing. If you still feel like you need an app to help plan a group activity without the hassle of email chains, sign up for Todofeed and get your friends and family on board.
I recommend sharing your feedback with the developers via email and on Twitter as they’re onto something with great potential but just need to fine-tune their idea before it becomes a truly powerful collaboration tool.