Signed up for a free account: the hint display blocks the bottom part of the add-story sidebar, which makes things more difficult to work with.

A way to get hints back after hiding them would be useful, too. Or some sort of way to summon contextual help. After hiding the hint to get it out of my way, I found I didn’t know what “Size” meant, and wasn’t immediately sure of where to look.

By the way, I’m currently using pivotal tracker (which has the nice advantage of being free, for some reason), so that’s my baseline for comparison.

Minor annoyance: the names next to the « or » should be clickable also, the «» are too small as click targets, so dismissing a sidebar requires more care than it should.

Pivotal gives you an ability to assign FPs to estimate stories, while Zen strongly encourages that you try to make your stories equally sized. I think I like your approach better, since I know I tend to avoid large stories — I need to break it down first before I can work on it without being frightened of it.

There seems to be a bug with trying to edit a story owner while the backlog is open (maybe applies to other sidebars as well, didn’t check). When I click the name, it disappears, then if I close the sidebar, the form shows up. If I click on multiple stories while the bar is open, I only get the form on one of them, and have to refresh the page to see the owners again. This is in Safari 4, didn’t check other browsers.

It would be nice if stories could be left unassigned in the backlog (perhaps this is meant to be possible, but is buggy? I can’t tell due to bug in above paragraph). Actually, I’d be happiest if stories added to the backlog defaulted to unassigned.

It took me too long to figure out how to reach the focus view, since you have to hover over the # (which I didn’t realize was clickable), and it is small. Feels like there should be an easier way, though I don’t have a suggestion at the moment.

Focus view of a story seems less-nice than the rest of the app. Too cluttered. Oh wait, if I hide the hint, it looks much nicer. I want to be able to widen the sidebar in focus view to have the values line up with the headings, making it shorter to get rid of the scrollbar I have there at my current window height (just a little bit too short).

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Above was comments while I was playing with the app, hopefully it’s organized enough, because I’m too lazy to go back and review.

I think I like your approach more than Pivotal Tracker. Cleaner, and more pleasant, although you need to work really hard to address each and every interface quirk (a couple of which I mentioned above), since the primary appeal of your app is that it has a clean and fluid interface.

Customizable process (without a cluttered interface to manage it!) is a win. The way it is setup should help discourage people from having too many steps in the process, as well, since then the board would become unusable.

My 2 main sticking points:

1. Pivotal is free (again, I have no idea why. They should be taking my money right now)

2. I am unsure about the lack of time estimation (Pivotal provides, I think, the best method I’ve seen of time estimates, if you’re going to have them). Maybe it’s better to not have? I’m not sure.

Anyway, I have a project I’m just starting, with 1 other person. Will have to see if Zen tempts me enough to pay the $9 I’d need ;)

Some closing random thoughts:

1. Put a mini version of your logo to the left of Features (without moving Features to the right) in the nav bar, on every page except the home page. Or something along those lines. We really do look in the top-left to get back to the home page.

2. … just the 1 thought I guess. I had another, but I lost it.