Why do task management apps suck?

Let me elaborate: “Why do task management apps suck in terms of helping you know what to work on next and efficiently manage your teams and projects?”

Hi, I am Val Sopi and I have just launched Claritask.com — a task management app that is easily adaptable to various styles of project management and offers project owners an overview of what everyone’s up to.

I’ve built the entire thing on my own and just launched a few weeks ago. I have already managed to garner paying clients and it hasn’t yet been a month since my public launch on February 8, 2019.

Backstory

Claritask was born from 7 years of building project management apps and interviewing clients on how to best manage highly productive agencies.

During these meetings and interviews I’ve always leaned towards asking questions with potentially positive outcomes. This is totally fine, because these questions lead to finding out what clients like the most in their current status quo, however they don’t lead to discovery, which is what we actually must be after.

A quick hypothesis

A few weeks ago, I was running a quick test with a small group of clients just to see if my hypothesis was any good — and that was to ask clients about the negatives of Claritask and “why nots?”.

This was one of my actual questions:

• Your friend is thinking about using Claritask and you are trying to talk them out of it. What would you say?

Say what!? —Please, bear with me : )

What this question does is help the person dig deep when answering and hopefully reveal some nitty-gritty details that could lead to new discoveries.

A few responders were extremely nice and didn’t want to partake in my little experiment. They said things, like: “I wouldn’t talk them out”, “I think Claritask is nice”…

A few other ones were game. Even though they started out by being kind in their responses, they really dug deeper and helped me realize a few areas in Claritask that needed improvement.

Their answers led me to new key improvement that are my go to features at the moment for existing and new users alike:

• “My Tasks” — where staff members get to see what’s on their plate and further filter tasks based on their priorities/tags.
• “Everything” section — where admins get to see “latest” in all areas of tasks and comments.
• And further improvements in the “Time tracking/timesheets” aspect of Claritask, which agencies need the most when reporting internally and to their clients.

With my hypothesis working so well, now I am constantly running these types of tests where I get to bash my own product— always in hope of finding little sparks that could start a bigger fire.

My negative question for today

Today, I have one simple question and it doesn’t have to do with Claritask per se, but overall, with project management apps.

With all their shiny designs and numerous features, they still have to achieve their ‘stickiness’ and really become useful in our day to day operations. That’s why probably there are so many of them. And that’s why I made Claritask — in quest to making a task management app that really assists us in working better, every day.

My one hard question for you today is this: https://claritask.typeform.com/to/TCj4dL

Please, share this article via Twitter (or simply clap) if you can, so I can reach as many responders as I can and make Claritask the best it can be. If you are so kind to provide me with your ‘negatives’, I would love to extend a kind discount your way for your and your team, if you ever decide to use Claritask.

Thank you!