[Design] Accomplice

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:05 PM 1/29/2007 -0800, Philippe Bossut wrote:
>Hi there,
>
>Yes another GTD product, this one integrating with Outlook:
>    http://www.accomplice.com/index.html
>
>Anyone has been using / testing / heard about it? It's Windows only so I 
>can't install it and it's hard to get a fair idea of how it works based on 
>the marketing material on the site.

Did you watch the tutorial video?

http://www.accomplice.com/tutorials/quickstart.html

There are some more docs and videos here:

http://www.accomplice.com/tutorials.html

I downloaded it and played with it for a few minutes, and my net assessment 
is that it is a poor execution of a very good idea/workflow design.  If it 
were not for the poor execution, I would probably switch to it from 
Ecco.  Its concepts of collections, filtering, one-click tickler, and 
simple collaboration are very good, but the usability is hampered by 
awkward rendering, poor font choices, lack of clear visual hierarchy 
between controls (and inconsistent visual cues as to what controls look 
like: some are links, some are buttons, and some are just icons).  The 
choice of status selection as a dropdown arrow next to a checkbox is just 
weird and awkward.  Their attempts to build lots of help into the product 
using large grey text in the background of various work areas just makes 
the visuals even more confusing.

All that having been said, the underlying conceptual design and workflow 
seems quite solid, especially how well thought-out the collaborative task 
management appears to be.  It would be a better GTD tool if it had a way to 
find all the "next actions" and automatically track what's next within each 
project, but as it is it would still be pretty usable -- assuming you could 
get past the hideous and awkward visuals.