My personal notes for Building a Mass-Market Product

Trello is different because it’s horizontal. The goal of the product isn’t to dictate a mental model to you, it’s for you to be able to tell the product what your mental model is. Their metaphor is “sticky notes on a whiteboard.”

In order to prevent obstructing the user’s mental model, Trello uses a visual language to describe what’s happening. A person seeing the interface, intuits how its supposed to work and applies their workflow on top of the product.

Trello gets everyone on the team on the same page. Everyone sees the same thing.

Trello uses “power ups” as a way to add advanced features, but prevent most people who don’t care about the from seeing them.