At the bottom of the HCL Domino Workspace homepage, there are three widgets related to Huddo Boards: My Tasks, Task Progress, and Tasks Completed.
I like the idea of bringing Huddo Boards information directly onto the HCL Domino Workspace homepage. In fact, I think this kind of integration is very important because the homepage should provide users with a rich and useful overview of what is happening across HCL Domino Workspace.
However, I think the current implementation needs a deeper integration with Huddo Boards, particularly regarding content types, terminology, task status, and the scope of the information displayed.
My Tasks
My Tasks is probably the most useful of the three widgets. I like the fact that it shows the Tasks assigned to me personally.
However, there is currently an important issue: Notes are also displayed as Tasks.
Huddo Boards distinguishes clearly between Tasks and Notes, and I think the HCL Domino Workspace homepage should do the same. If a widget is called My Tasks, I would expect it to contain actual Tasks only.
I would also suggest using the same terminology as Huddo Boards. For example, instead of introducing different concepts such as Today and Upcoming, I think the homepage should use the terminology users already know from Huddo Boards, particularly Start Date and Due Date.
Keeping the terminology consistent between Huddo Boards and HCL Domino Workspace would make the integration feel much more natural and avoid users having to learn two different ways of describing the same information.
Task Progress
The Task Progress widget allows me to select a Board and currently displays the progress using To Do, Doing, and Done.
There are several things I would reconsider here.
First, Notes are also counted as Tasks, which means the numbers do not necessarily represent the actual number of Tasks in the selected Board. Huddo Boards clearly distinguishes between Tasks and Notes, and I think the HCL Domino Workspace homepage should do the same. Task related widgets should only consider actual Tasks.
Second, the scope of the Tasks shown is different from the other task widgets. My Tasks represents Tasks assigned to me personally, and Tasks Completed also appears to focus on my Tasks. Task Progress, however, appears to show all Tasks within the selected Board, regardless of who they are assigned to.
I think this distinction should be made much more explicit.
It can certainly be useful to see the progress of an entire Board, particularly for someone managing a Board. However, most users working with a Board are not necessarily Board managers. They are often simply users who need to complete the Tasks assigned to them.
I would therefore suggest adding a simple option to Task Progress to switch between:
My Tasks | All Tasks
This could be implemented as a simple toggle, allowing the user to switch between their personal Tasks and all Tasks within the selected Board.
That would make the widget much more flexible while also making its scope immediately clear to the user.
There is also the question of how Doing is currently determined.
It appears that a Task is considered “Doing” when it is located in a Board column called Doing. However, this does not seem to be a reliable way of determining task status because Board columns can be freely renamed and customized.
A Board might use columns such as:
Backlog → In Development → Review → Testing → Released
In that scenario, there is no obvious “Doing” column, even though several of these stages could represent work that is currently in progress.
I think the integration should therefore not depend on specific column names.
One possible approach would be to use the actual task data. For example, if a Task has a Start Date and that date has been reached or passed, the Task could potentially be considered active. If the Due Date has also passed and the Task is not completed, it could be identified as overdue.
Alternatively, if this cannot be determined reliably, I would rather remove the Doing category than present information that can easily be misleading.
The important point is that the HCL Domino Workspace homepage should provide information that users can trust.
Tasks Completed
The Tasks Completed widget provides a simple overview of completed Tasks.
The functionality itself is useful, but I find the available timeframes somewhat unusual. Currently, the widget appears to offer two fixed periods: March to August and September to February.
I am not sure what the reasoning behind these specific six month periods is. If the intention is to provide users with a timeframe based view of completed Tasks, I think it would be much more useful to provide both predefined time ranges and a custom date range.
For example, useful presets could include:
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Last 7 days
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Last 14 days
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Last month
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Last year
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Custom date range
The Custom date range could use a date picker where users can select a start and end date manually. Ideally, the selected timeframe would also be persisted so that users do not have to configure it again every time they return to the HCL Domino Workspace homepage.
This would make the widget much more flexible while still providing quick access to the most common timeframes.
Overall observation: The homepage is the key integration point
I think this is actually more important than just the individual widgets.
The HCL Domino Workspace homepage should be the central, high value entry point into the product. It should give users a rich overview of the information that matters to them and make them feel that HCL Domino Workspace is a genuinely integrated application rather than a collection of individual services displayed next to each other.
At the moment, some of the homepage functionality feels like an additional React based layer that sits on top of the underlying services. Because of that, some of the terminology and semantics do not always seem to match what users see inside the individual services.
I think there should be a much stronger integration between the homepage and the underlying services, including shared terminology, shared data semantics, and consistent handling of objects.
For Huddo Boards specifically, the homepage should understand the difference between Tasks and Notes, use the same terminology as Huddo Boards, and derive task information from the actual task data rather than assumptions about how a Board happens to be configured.
From a user perspective, the homepage is where I would expect to get a quick and reliable overview of what requires my attention. The more accurate and meaningful that information is, the more valuable the entire HCL Domino Workspace becomes.
For me, the quality of the homepage is one of the key factors in making HCL Domino Workspace feel like a truly integrated product. It should not simply provide previews of the individual services. It should bring their information together in a way that is consistent, meaningful, and genuinely useful to the user.