Best of Web 2.0: Interview with Remember the Milk’s founders

What’s a girl got to do when she has too many things to accomplish and too little time? Creating a to do list, of course! But not any simple, paper-based to do list. We are too geeky and our world is too complicated for old fashion to do lists (you know the drill: the lists multiply, they are never there when we need them, and life changes too fast for a static paper document).

Luckily for us, the Web 2.0 new wave has brought us many tools to create fancier and ubiquitous to do lists, from 37 Signals’ Tada List and Backpack, to Mark Hurst’s Gootodo. None of them however is so elegant, well designed, and grown-up as Remember the Milk (aka RTM).

The Buzz

 RTM can work as simply as a paper to do list. You type “t,” add the new item, and press Enter. Once creating a simple list of to dos becomes too boring, you’ll discover that you can add priority, due date and time, durations, tags, and notes. But wait, there is more: you can create repeated to dos, share to dos, use a secure connection, create smart lists, and print neatly organized daily and weekly lists. The magic is that the more complex features never get in the way of the simpler tasks. You can start using RTM immediately, but you’ll continue to discover new neat things along the way.

What charmed me about RTM are the little usability features sprinkled through the interface. For example, you can use natural language to enter dates and times without confusing RTM. You can write “tomorrow” or “Wednesday” or “april 22 at 3PM” and RTM will interpret them correctly. The last action you perform is called out in an orange box and–listen to this–you can undo your most recent action. Yes, you heard me: if you make a mistake you can go back and fix it. Once you get more familiar with RTM you can start use keyboard shortcuts, which make adding and managing the to dos quite efficient.

And, yes, Remember the Milk is free.

The Interview with Emily, Omar, and Bob T.

RTM is the brainchild of a three-person team located in Sydney, Australia. I asked Emily Boyd, Omar Kilani, and Bob T. Monkey to tell me more about Remember the Milk.

AP: Are you really just two people and a stuffed monkey in Sydney, Australia?

RTM: Indeed we are. Never underestimate the value of having a stuffed monkey on your team.

AP: How did you find each other? Have you worked on other projects together?

RTM: We met while we were both (briefly!) attending university in Sydney — we ended up working on an assignment together for a Computer Science class.

Since then, we’ve worked on a few projects together. Omar founded the Linux distribution tinysofa, and Emily has helped out on the design aspects of that. We also worked together to redesign the website of open source database PostgreSQL.

AP: How did you have the idea of creating Remember The Milk?

RTM: Emily’s an obsessive to-do list maker and had always dreamed of designing the ideal interface for managing to-do lists online, while Omar was more interested in the technical challenge.

We set out to create the best way for people to manage their to-do lists — something as simple and easy to use as possible so that people no longer have to write their to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the backs of their hands.

We wanted the application to appeal to as many people as possible, so we tried to make it flexible and full-featured while retaining simplicity and ease of use.

Making a good team, we decided to work together to bring the idea to the masses.

AP: How do you divide roles and responsibilities among the three of you?

RTM: Our roles are complimentary — Emily designed the UI of the application, worked out what functionality was really critical and what wasn’t, wrote the help documentation, coded most of the HTML and CSS behind the site (with many hours of hair-tearing frustration solving browser-specific CSS issues) and manages pretty much all communications with the outside world (and much, much more).

Omar makes Emily’s UI/UX ideas a reality — which usually means doing tricky things with JavaScript. He also likes to architect scalable and efficient systems — which usually means writing a lot of code in many different languages. Omar is really obsessed with performance.

Bob, on the other hand, looks after our JavaScript — it’s a full time job, since there’s a lot of the stuff! Oh, he’s also our mascot. He likes coffee and bananas (but not at the same time — ewww).

AP: What did you do to create a good user experience? Did you do any form of user testing or user research?

Many people create task lists in simple text files because it’s a fast and easy way to manage tasks. We set out to create a user experience with Remember The Milk that was just as fast and easy to use — with the addition of functionality that you really can’t get out of a text file like reminders, repeating tasks, advanced search and smart lists.

We didn’t do any formal testing or research, but we personally used the system for a year or so — testing things for a long enough period of time to decide whether we really liked them, or they really annoyed us. As we got closer and closer to a launch date, we started adding more private beta testers (friends and family) and tweaked little bits here and there.

AP: How do you deal with feedback from users? How do you choose what to implement and how?

RTM: We love receiving feedback — and we’d be lying if we said that it didn’t influence what we worked on next. We usually have a lot of new functionality in mind that we’re constantly thinking about, and feedback from users definitely plays a part in our decisions on what to implement and why. We try to get to the bottom of feature requests — we ask ourselves “Why is this being requested? IS there something that we can provide at a lower level that would satisfy this request and many others.” Then we do that.

AP: What are the future plans? Meaning: Do you plan to make money out of it, and how? (OK, you don’t have to answer this if you have secret plans for RTM)

RTM: We have secret plans for Remember The Milk. We want to make people more productive. 🙂

Antonella’s Wish List for RTM

RTM is a really nice tool and I because I love it, I am keeping a list of what I would like to be able to do in next versions (of course I keep the list in RTM):

• To make some task edits on the Overview page (the screen that shows today, tomorrow, and overdue tasks): for example, to mark a task complete, change priority, or postpone it.
• Tags: have the task cloud accessible from all pages, not only on the Overview page, and have a tag auto-complete function as in Del.icio.us.
• To create task lists for next or previous weeks or for a different time frame on the Overview page.
• To link tasks together as follow-ups and to be able to retrieve them all or move through a sequence.
• To have more space available in the task title entry field (long titles are hard to edit)
• To see total time estimate when multiple tasks are selected or for all today’s tasks on the overview page; To search by task duration. [Update: Emily pointed me to a neat hidden feature of RTM Search. One can search for task duration by typing things like: timeEstimate:”1 hour” or timeEstimate:”> 1 hour” or timeEstimate:”< 1 hour”]
• Being able to print a task with all the associated information (including title, day and time, duration, notes, etc.)
• Eliminate the ability to do multiple editing of task titles (it’s a disruptive action that had caught me already twice: and all my task titles are gone!)

Thanks to Emily, Omar, and Bob T. for a great productivity tool!

Tags: todo, GTD, design, Web2.0, userinterface, userexperience