The Pane is a Pain

I’m building out a processing pane in Cue. The goal isn’t the pane so much as a clear processing workflow for any list, but for now it’s limited to the inbox, and it’s a pane. It’s also a pain, as I try to figure out a design that works well with the existing tooling, or as a replacement for it. Pre-pane, if you select a todo, you get a little action bar over the todo for deleting, marking it as a header, or pinning it. If you select multiple todos, you get a bulk delete option at the bottom of the list. You can also drag and drop a single, or multiple selected todos to another list. And the new processing pane, which shows up in the inbox when it’s side by side with another list, gives you shortcuts for deferring to tomorrow, next week, or next month, a new way to move to any other list as well, and deleting.

As I type it all out, it feels very redundant. But having the code written up was easy, thanks to LLM tooling. Now I want to rethink all three of those options, though, and build something simpler. In the long run, that’s the point of good product design - to build something simple and complete. It’s about finding the right abstractions, the right workflows - getting the perfect balance between specific use cases and more generic abilities.

And Cue is more about specific workflows. Some tools try to be more generic, catering to any workflow. Generic tools (like Notion, Excel, Trello) are great for enabling large classes of solutions. But they can often be outperformed by custom workflow tooling. Many of the successful SaaS companies over the last 15 years built specific solutions that replaced a workable approach created with Excel or Trello. The biggest challenge is building that custom workflow tooling in a way that actually handles the variety of ways that it can be used in practice. The tension between generic capabilities and efficiency gains from targeting specific workflows is real.

And so, as I work towards a solution, part of that work is eliminating different ways to do the same thing.