P
Peter Tenenbaum
The status options for ClickUp are confusing and odd. If you look at the attached screen shot, you will notice several things. First, there are two different hierarchies in place: there's the actual statuses (TO DO, PLANNING, IN PROGRESS, AT RISK, UPDATE REQUIRED, ON HOLD); then there's -- something else, categories maybe? -- NOT STARTED, ACTIVE, DONE. Second, you notice that there's no slider bar even though the menu options continue past the DONE marker: if you tap on the menu, the slider bar appears so you can slide down to see that COMPLETE is a status under category DONE. Third, status CANCELLED sits there without a category even though it turns out that CANCELLED is in category CLOSED. What's not shown is that, if you mouse over the check box next to the status, it will produce tooltip "Mark complete," but if you press it, the status will change to CANCELLED because CANCELLED is the status that goes with category CLOSED. In other words, the tooltip is utterly misleading.
If I ran the zoo, here is what I would do:
  1. Eliminate the categories. The fact that there are categories and statuses is a muddle.
  2. Make "Done" and "Closed" mandatory statuses (the user can still define any other statuses they like).
  3. Adjust the appearance of the drop-down menu so that a slider appears when the menu comes up, if a slider is required.
  4. Change the "Mark complete" tooltip to, "Mark closed." IMO, this is mandatory even if you reject all the other suggestions. Having a "Mark complete" that doesn't refer to the complete status but to the closed category violates the Principle of Least Surprise.
Convention over configuration!