New approach to contexts in Nozbe - first step.

When I initially launched Nozbe, I needed only several contexts that I believed would help me get stuff done. I did some analysis of my workflow and decided on 14 contexts that I thought would suffice to meet everyone’s needs.

Boy was I wrong. Already two weeks after Nozbe launch, I got lots of emails from my users saying:

“Michael, the contexts you chose for Nozbe are really good, but I need some of my own to really fit Nozbe into my workflow. How can I create my own contexts or modify the existing ones?”

Well, initially you couldn’t. So I gave my users an ability to create their own contexts. This was good, but wasn’t enough. My users still wanted to modify or remove the existing contexts. I made this available, too.

But when the family/team/business plans became available, the system wasn’t perfect again as the contexts did not match between people sharing the same project. It started to be really complicated.

• Example: “Let’s say a user Tom had a project: “Remodel home office” and invited his wife Gina to share the project and work on it together. Tom added a task “buy office desk” with a context “errands”. However, Gina wanted to contribute to this task as well and wanted to accommodate the task to fit her workflow and changed the context of this task to a custom context she created: “shopping for furniture”, as she’s got more furniture to buy for different projects of hers.

Now, after this small change, Tom who added the task suddenly cannot see it in his “errands” context. Moreover, he cannot see it in any of his contexts since he is not seeing Gina’s custom context “shopping for furniture”. Tom is confused… and we don’t want Tom or any of our users confused.

We’ve worked hard to change the context architecture and make them work a lot better.

Although we’ve made the incremental changes in contexts throughout the whole September, I’m blogging about it now since I believe it’s almost done and works as it should be.

New approach to contexts in Nozbe:

1. All users can modify their contexts now. In the beginning the free Nozbe users couldn’t modify their default contexts. Right now they receive 4 pre-defined contexts and can add new ones or modify existing ones to create their perfect working environment. Within their limit of 5 contexts.
2. Your contexts remain yours. You don’t share them with anyone. You can share projects and actions within these projects. However other people who work with you will be able to choose their own contexts for these tasks, meaning – the same task in a shared project can be in your “errands” context and someone else’s “shopping” project. It’s all flexible now.
3. Actions/Notes/Files don’t need to have contexts defined. Before the change, each action had to have a context defined. By default it was a “no context” context… which was rather confusing for many users. Right now you can add an action without any context and you’ll still be able to track it in your “contexts” section by clicking on the link: “actions without contexts” below your contexts list.

This new context architecture took us a lot of time to develop as we had to make sure all the existing users receive the same seamless experience.

What’s the second step?

Once we’ve introduced the new Nozbe re-design, you’ll be able to assign more contexts to one action. Sometimes you want to see an action in two or more contexts… and it will be possible when the new redesign is in place.

Hope you like the way the contexts work now.

We’ve put lots of effort to make the experience as smooth as possible and we’re looking forward to making it even better in the future once the Nozbe redesign is in place. As always, you’re more than welcome to comment on these changes below. Let me know how you use contexts and how much they mean to you :-)

Technorati tags: nozbe, contexts, gtd, team, business, productivity