![]() ![]() If you take care of it well (you close the lid carefully and don’t press too hard on the tip when you write) it will far outlive your project. As an example, in the picture below, most desks are within reading distance of their taskboard.Ī black permanent marker with a rounded tip is the only writing tool you will need. This means that team members might be able to read the taskboard from their desk, something desirable. If the taskboard is in the work area, chances are most desks will be located within this radius. If tasks are readable from two meters without effort, they might also be somewhat readable from a distance of up to 5 or 6 meters. Text written with whiteboard marker or dried up markers.Text written in ballpoint pen or pencil.Avoid the following readability anti-patterns: To achieve this, the taskboard has to invite to be read. Readability of tasks is cornerstone to generating and sustaining the feeling of transparency and trust that taskboards have the potential to transmit. Readability creates transparency and trust We are not trying to learn to decipher your doctor’s handwriting here, thank you. This makes a task difficult to read even if it complies with the 10-word rule and is written in big bold letters. The reason for writing in all capital letters is that lots of people have bad handwriting, or write in cursive when not writing capital letters. Most likely what will happen is that people will write the 10 words in a very small font, thus rendering it illegible from the required distance. Writing 10 words on a standard post-it in ballpoint pen in a text size that fills the post-it would result in a font that is too lightweight and disproportioned. Bold is required because of the distance we want to read from, and the size of the font we want to write in. The reason for using bold letters is to increase readability of the text. We should also avoid using sticky notes as “documentation hand-offs” between team members. We should avoid documenting tasks on the post-its as much as possible. The details of the work should be in the person’s head, having been discovered and defined by having conversations with the other team members. The goal of a task is to represent a unit of work. Not a full analysis or description of what has to be done. ![]() Tasks are meant to be pointers to the work that has to be done. You shouldn’t need to write a lot of text if you understood the nature of tasks and how to use them in your process. Tasks should have no more than 10 words because fitting more text into a 3×3 inch (76×76 mm) standard Post-It forces you to write too small, and we want to avoid that. In order to achieve this, we have to comply with two simple guidelines:ġ) Small amount of text: tasks should have no more than 10 words, as a rule of thumb.Ģ) If handwritten, text should be written in big, bold, capital letters. Why two meters? Because it is a reasonable (maximum) distance from the board you can expect people to be standing at during the daily standup meeting, and when passing by. Tasks should be easily readable and understandable by a person with normal sight from a distance of around two meters. But let’s try to agree on a general readability acceptance criteria. Readability will always be somewhat subjective: what could be perfectly readable for me, could be unintelligible for you. In this case we will focus on the first definition as it applies to answering the following question: how easy is it to read the tasks on our taskboard? There are two meanings, as in “a readable handwriting” and “a readable book”. Readability is defined as “how easy it is to read something”. Today I want to focus on how we write our tasks, and try to make a case for increased readability. In Visual Management for Agile Teams, I discussed the importance of usability and good design when building our taskboards. ![]()
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