Kanban Board | LlamaPress Pattern Catalog
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Scan & Understand
Pattern

Kanban Board

Work shown as columns of cards, one column per stage, moved by dragging — the shape of the whole process visible at once, at the cost of everything a table is good at.

Scan & Understand Move Through Workflow

A team needs to see where every piece of work is and shift things between stages. A table shows the records but not the distribution, so nobody notices that one stage is holding thirty items until it becomes an incident.

Live demo — try it Open full screen
Use when
  • Work moves through a small number of named stages — ideally three to six.
  • Where things are stuck is a question the team asks regularly.
  • Moving an item between stages is a normal, frequent action.
  • Everything in flight fits on one screen, roughly under a hundred items.
Avoid when
  • There are hundreds of items. A board becomes unreadable long before a table does.
  • People need to compare items on a number — a board has no columns to align.
  • There are more than about seven stages, where horizontal scrolling hides half the process.
  • Only one person works the queue. A queue is more efficient than a board.

Anatomy

  To do (4)        In progress (7)     Blocked (3)      Done (12)
  ┌──────────┐     ┌──────────┐        ┌──────────┐     ┌──────────┐
  │ JOB-118  │     │ JOB-102  │        │ JOB-097  │     │ JOB-091  │
  │ Framing  │     │ Wiring   │        │ Glazing  │     │ Strip out│
  │ Dana     │     │ Sam · 9d │◀ aged  │ Priya·14d│     │ Sam      │
  └──────────┘     └──────────┘        └──────────┘     └──────────┘
       …                 …                  …                …
                    ↑ the count is the point: 7 in progress,
                      3 blocked — visible without reading a card
  • Counts on headings. The distribution is the information; the cards are detail.
  • Small cards. Four facts maximum. A board of large cards is a card list with extra scrolling.
  • Age on cards that have aged. Without it, a card parked for three weeks looks the same as one that arrived this morning.
  • A keyboard path for every drag. Drag-and-drop as the only mechanism excludes people and breaks on touch.

Why it works

It makes distribution preattentive. You do not read a board, you look at it: one tall column is a bottleneck, and you see it before you have read a single card. No table conveys that in under a second.

It also makes moving work physical. Dragging a card is direct manipulation — the thing you are looking at is the thing you are changing — which is the consistency principle at its most literal, and it is why boards feel good to use in a way status dropdowns do not.

What you give up

A board has no columns, in the table sense, so it has nothing to align. That means no sorting, no comparison across a metric, and no scanning a value down a list. Amounts, dates and durations all become text on cards, readable one at a time.

That is a genuine trade, not a flaw — but it means a board is the wrong default for anything where the question is "which is largest / oldest / most expensive". Many teams adopt a board for its overview and then discover they have lost the list they actually worked from. Offering both views over the same data is usually the right answer.

Getting it wrong

  • Cards that grew. Six fields and a description per card, so four cards fill the screen and the overview is gone.
  • Too many columns. Past about seven, the process scrolls sideways and can never be seen at once — which was the entire reason to build a board.
  • A Done column that grows forever, eventually dominating the board with finished work. Archive it, or cap it to a recent window.
  • No age indicator, so the board shows where things are but never that they are stuck.
  • Drag-only. Unusable by keyboard, awkward on touch, and impossible on a long column where the target is off-screen.

Exemplars

Trello defined the pattern and demonstrates its limit just as clearly: it is excellent at fifty cards and unusable at five hundred.

Linear offers board and list over identical data and lets people switch, which is the mature answer — the board is a view, not the model.

Jira's board with explicit work-in-progress limits shows the original manufacturing idea intact: the column count is not decoration, it is a constraint the team agreed to, and the board enforces it.

The extractable rule: a board is a view for seeing distribution, not a container for work. The moment it becomes the only way to see the data, you have traded away sorting and comparison for a picture.

Instead of this, consider

Same problem, different trade-off. Pick on the condition, not on taste.

Dense Operational Table
When: People compare and sort more than they move things between stages.
Review Queue
When: One person works items one at a time and throughput matters more than overview.
Grouped List
When: You want the same grouping benefit without giving up alignment and sorting.

Ask Leo for this

Paste this into your Leo chat. It describes the behaviour, not the code, so Leo can fit it to your data.

Prompt 
Build a kanban board for this workflow.

- One column per stage, in process order, using the stage names the team says
  out loud.
- Show a count on every column heading, and let a column show a limit when the
  team has agreed one.
- Keep cards small — the identifier, the title, the owner, and at most one
  more fact. A board's value is the overview, and big cards destroy it.
- Dragging a card to another column moves it and persists immediately. Show
  the drop target clearly while dragging.
- Every drag must also be possible without a mouse: a move action on the card
  that picks the target stage from a list.
- Show the age of a card in its current column, at least for the ones that
  have been there a long time. Stuck work is the main thing a board should
  reveal.
- If a column can exceed about twenty cards, scroll it independently and keep
  the heading and count fixed.

Related

Pattern
Linear Workflow
The topology underneath — get the stages right before drawing columns.
Pattern
Dense Operational Table
What a board gives up — alignment, sorting and comparison.