Strike

We keep very busy here at ZURB. At any given time, we have between 12 to 15 clients, juggling their projects with our own. There's always something to do, and get done quickly. So, yeah, we don't have a lot of time to waste.

To make it dead simple to stay organized, we decided to build an app that would help us stay on top of things, and if it worked for us, then it could work for others as well. The app worked great and had a lot of things going for it, such as collaborative tasks and Notable integration. But things didn't work out they way we thought they would and we had to scrap the app, regroup, and come up with Strike instead.

Scrumptious Strikes Back

Originally, our task list web app was called Scrumptious. As we were building it, we teased the heck out of it, building up a sizable buzz. People even signed up to be notified of its release. For months, we got people asking us, "When is Scrumptious coming out? When can we start using it?" Yeah, it was gonna be pretty hot. And then ... we didn't release it.

It's not that we didn't have anything to release. Believe it or not, we actually built Scrumptious, even using the app on a daily basis at ZURB as part of our scrums. We toiled for months, iterating Scrumptious over and over again.

One iteration of Scrumptious.

Midway through Scrumptious development, however, we were struck by the realization that we weren't solving a problem or helping people work or design better. We were building something we thought people wanted. So we halted development and stopped using it altogether. At that point, we had done two iterations of Scrumptious, which we had renamed Resolve.

No Gutter Balls

We didn't let all our effort go to waste. Rather than throwing the entire thing out, we regrouped and whittled Scrumptious down to its core interactions: adding tasks and sharing lists. Out of that, we decided to do Strike instead.

With Strike, we were determine to nail these two interactions. However, this time, we put constraints on ourselves — it had to be dead-simple to use, no sign-ups, and easy to share with others.

We even used an early prototype, filling it with tasks that were needed to finish Strike. Check it out by clicking the picture below:

Even though we built Strike in lieu of Scrumptious, we learned a lot from both. Scrumptious taught us what features we needed and which ones we didn't. Strike taught us to create a fast, slick interface that doesn't complicate its core value. We're taking those lessons and applying them to Resolve, the successor to Scrumptious. Think of it this way — if Scrumptious was the original Starship Enterprise than Resolve is the Enterprise from "The Next Generation."

Bowling a Perfect Game

After releasing Strike, we found that techies weren't the only ones using Strike. Dr. Rajatt Bhatt, a physician from New York City, used Strike to keep track of his appointments. As a doctor, Bhatt is extremely busy, running from patient-to-patient to perform tests and examine results. It's really easy for him to lose track of who he has and hasn't seen. He told us that he keeps handy a Strike list with all the patients he needs to see on a given day.

The feature I like most (and that is different from other listing sites) is that I can strike off the patients I have checked on and then click on another view so they are marked as read and the names disappear off the list.

Dr. Bhatt wasn't the only one using Strike. A New York design agency and a Colorado ad agency are knocking down tasks with Strike too.

Strike has also received some media love from ReadWriteWeb and others. So go ...

Knock Down Some Tasks

Check out our other feeder apps: Axe, Bounce, Chop, Clue, Reel, and Spur.