This is an excerpt from an internal discussion at Park Assist on 2016-07-08:
Me:
April and I are pairing up on an effort to… and we felt that we should use a system to track the work, but we were loath to use JIRA. So we’re trying out Clubhouse. I’m going to send everyone an invite; feel free to poke around, try it out, etc.
Ilan Goodman:
On my first pass, it seems very similar to JIRA right out of the box. Can you elaborate on what you dislike about JIRA and why Clubhouse might be better?
Me:
Broadly:
JIRA feels slow and heavy whereas Clubhouse feels fast and light.
JIRA feels complex and (cognitively) heavy whereas Clubhouse feels simple and (cognitively) light.
JIRA’s attempt to be everything and anything for everyone, and therefore to be extremely flexible, puts a large burden on its users to make decisions all the time on how to use it. In contrast, Clubhouse is much more focused and much more opinionated, which means it puts a much lesser burden on its users.
JIRA feels like a couple of different systems jammed together, and the seams are unavoidable, unsightly, and unseemly. Navigating can be confusing, and it’s hard to build a coherent mental modal of JIRA’s domain model (partly because of its chimeric nature, partly because it barely has a domain model, it’s more like a framework for defining domain models). Actually, it feels this way because it actually is a couple of different systems jammed together. In contrast, Clubhouse feels like a single coherent system with a clear domain model.
Basically, using JIRA makes me feel bad; using Clubhouse makes me feel good.