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Donate an idea to HN: Checklists
53 points by RiderOfGiraffes on Sept 1, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments
Here's an idea that I'm never going to get time to follow up. Maybe it has merit, maybe not. If you want it, it's yours. If it makes billions, remember me.

A colleague who is a hobbyist aerobatics pilot says that aviation has become as safe as it is through the ubiquitous use of checklists. Everything has a checklist, and said checklist goes into the smallest detail. I've taken that on-board and we're starting to use explicit checklists when we deploy new systems, run through tests, diagnose problems, etc., and it's starting to make a real difference.

But building the checklists was a pain.

Recently I had a new boiler installed at home. No problems, great hot water, great heating, everything seemed fine. Now I find that some of the hot water taps are leaking. They were installed with the older, lower pressure system in place, and they need upgrading to cope with mains pressure hot water. Similarly, sometimes the kitchen hot water tap makes loud, ugly noises.

If I'd had a checklist of things to confirm before signing off, the plumbers would never have left the building without dealing with them. They're being great, but it's costing them time and money, and me hassle, to get these things put straight.

A checklist would save time, money and hassle.

How about a web site where I type in "Hot water" and it gives me a checklist. Or "New ISP" and it gives me a checklist. Perhaps the checklist can then be refined further, or perhaps it allows me to mark things as done or pending.

I think I'd pay money to be registered with a site like that.

Comments?




http://chcheck.com

You can create checklists, create and track changes between instances, diff changes between the master and instances, create iterative checklists, embed checklists in other checklists and set dependencies. Also the interface was built with usability and flexibility in mind.

I have also added task, data list, comment, contact and document management since all of those are necessary for a good process management tool.

My inspiration for this was the fact that process and workflow management is a pain point for individuals and small businesses and there have been no easy-to-setup, user focused solutions out there.

I will be putting up a directory of public checklists in the near future, once the rest of the product is stable and usable.

I was waiting to post this but until I was ready to open signups but I have working on it for the last 4 months.

Email me if you want to be a Beta user: daniel at chcheck dot com. There are some bugs but it is definitely usable.


I will be putting up a directory of public checklists in the near future.

Isn't the idea posted above more focused on the crowdsourcing/directory aspect of this, and not so much the "I've created a great checklist creator!" part? It's not "EXACTLY" what s/he's talking about by any means.


I apologize if that seemed like an exaggeration. The directory is why I created this product, that feature is just not out-the-door yet. This post was a little earlier than I was planning.

One of the intentions of the product is to handle these large distributed processes with the management of a Master Checklist that can be diffed with other masters and instances. I added that feature to facilitate those sort of crowdsourced checklists/processes.


OK, so I've landed on the login page, logged in, and now I want to say - "I'm getting a new washing machine - what's my checklist."

Alternatively, I've had a bad experience getting a washing machine, and I want to add the item:

"When buying a washing machine, make sure it can accept mains pressure hot water."

I can't see how to do that.


The app you are logged into is a place to create and share your checklists with a defined group of users, for team and business settings.

What you are looking at also provides the interface you login to when you want to create checklists or work with one of your running checklist instances.

What you are talking about, the directory piece of the puzzle, is in development and almost out the door. It will allow you to find checklists in this manner and clone them into your account so you can edit them and create any number of instances based on them.


OK, based on a very brief splash, I think you need to email me in a week to tell me what I can do, then email me a week after that telling me what more I can do, and what people have already created on it, including you. If you want me to be a beta tester - and I'm happy to play with it for 5 minutes each week and risk getting sucked into more - then I need to know that it's got something I want.

Currently I can't see anything I want. I can't even really understand what it does have. It looks good, it looks like there might be substance, but from the screen I'm on I can't understand what it thinks I'm trying to do.

Does that make sense?

I'll email you separately, and this isn't entirely negative, and I want it to work for me.

And what's a "module"? And what does "Add a new object" mean?


Again -- a feature that wasn't ready for public consumption.

The system has a few different objects that can be embedded in pages and checklists - todo lists, data lists, docs, files, comments and other checklists. The feature needs some work before its usable.


> Again -- a feature that wasn't ready for public consumption.

Understood.

I think the underlying problem here is that you have a particular model in your mind of objects and actions, and I, as yet, have no way of discovering what that model is, why it's useful, or how I use it. I think you need to make explicit, either through the interface itself, or with an explanation (big, bold cartoons can be effective) what your underlying model really is.

Whether you should stop coding and do it now, or whether you should finish alpha coding and then do it, is up to you, but without some sort of communication of your model of what happens, I don't think you'll get any useful feedback.

I hope that helps - it's intended to. More via email.


Rider, thanks for the feedback.

This happened about a month sooner than I was planning so I haven't had a chance to address the learnability of the app yet. Would love to have you check it out when I am a little farther along.


Looks sharp, but it looks like it's somewhat more orientated towards businesses - this isn't a bad thing, but inline with the original HN request above, I think you will likely need two workflows: business and 'public'.

The public workflow would need to be super-simple looking (that whole web 2.0-ish look 'n feel) with prominent search. Perhaps something like: chcheck.com/business vs chcheck.com/public and chcheck.com/ would represent the user's path choice.

Just some thoughts - perhaps you're already moving down a similar path. Best of luck!


chcheck is designed first and foremost to be useful for individuals, small teams and small businesses.

The current interface is in the process of being given a more understandable and inviting initial user experience to accomplish that.


I briefly considered the implications of a similar service which would gather checklists of important dates for small businesses. For example, tax return filing dates, sales tax quarterly payments, business license renewal dates, etc.

The rough idea was that you would collect this public information, add a calendar/reminder component and then localize (which would be the hard part).

It sounds as if you may be going down this path at some point in the future. If so, I think it would be a very interesting service for which small businesses might pay a token yearly fee.


I am working on a few of the features of chcheck.com for Daniel, and I also helped him out with another project. We have been using chcheck checklists and to-do lists during the actual development of chcheck.com, and also with the other side project. Shared checklists were quite useful, as we used them for planning, bug testing, deployment, etc..

I'm looking forward to seeing the finished site with all of the features Daniel has in mind fully implemented


On the power of checklists, see also Atul Gawande's article in the New Yorker (10 December 2007) (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...).

The article describes how medical checklists, especially when nurses are empowered to force doctors to follow them, can improve patient outcomes.

The article also mentions an interesting example of checklists in aviation history.


This article is amazing!

I am also struck when reading Gawande that in many ways, his writing is like Gladwell's: interesting anecdote, statement of principle, seemingly unrelated anecdote, full description of principle.

However, given these same elements, I feel much more convinced by Gawande than by Gladwell. The latter's principles never really seem to follow from the anecdotes quoted; there's a logical gap, or he seems to be misinterpreting the research, or he's found a corner-case, or he's just grasping for straws.

Yet, I can't really figure out why I don't feel the same way about Gawande. Perhaps because he writes mostly about medicine, and as a (former?) doctor, he lends more credibility? Whereas Gladwell writes about more everyday and varied things, in which he is obviously not an expert?


+1 -- the article is a must-read if you're interested in checklists (or health care, for that matter).


eHow kind of does that:

http://www.ehow.com/search.aspx?s=hot+water&Options=0


Given internet access, one could build such a thing pretty easily atop SpringPad, which has pretty extensive template generation and sharing features built in:

http://springpadit.com

I used to work with a number of these guys. Given what I know about how the site works, they could probably get you off and running pretty quickly in the unlikely event that it doesn't already do what you want.


I really wanted something like this for going hiking. When you go on a four-day hike it really, really sucks if you forget something important. But there are about 20 important things, so you can't rely on remembering them all. You need to build a checklist. But this process takes a while and discourages casual hikers from going on longer hikes.

So I would love a checklist tool that I could use for this. Right now I am using jottit and just making a list; if your system worked better I would use it.


I similarly think of this every year when I go on an annual camping trip with a group of friends. We have a short group list on a website that we use, but it would be helpful if we could edit that and add to it. Each year it is inevitable that something is forgotten or we talk about something in January but fail to remember it in August/September.

I often check my gear against lists that are published by camping supply companies (Coleman, etc). Much further down the line, it might be an interesting business model to allow for "sponsored" lists.


None other than that if you or somebody else builds it let me know, I'll be a user for sure. That's an excellent idea.

Combine it with a todo list service maybe ?


http://chcheck.com - daniel at chcheck dot com if you wanna try it out


I had a look at this and it is quite promising.


http://www.enleiten.com went for that approach, but hasn't really gotten over the chicken-egg problem wrt public user lists. Still, might be interesting.


Requires a login, and won't let me contribute something that might be useful without first giving an email address.

That's their chicken-and-egg problem, and it's in their hands. Let people contribute without a login, let them benefit from their contributions, and people will play. Control the quality in the first stages and you have a viable product.


I had the same idea !

Hunch.com inspired me for a website like that.

It could be really useful to solve basic car troubles or anything technical.


See http://www.ehow.com/ they have a wiki-enabled process description model: they are a decade old and have a large set of checklists.


I would need to dig for the article - but recently some doctors have radically reduced the mistakes made in surgery by utilizing checklist procedures - you are on to something here.


How useful would it be if users make checklists for themselves because the tasks involved are likely to be repeated many times (e.g., going on a trip)?


Interesting idea.

How would you deal with differences of opinions in what should be on the checklist for a topic? Wiki-style colloboration?


there are THOUSANDS of site offering this product. Do you research your ideas before you post them? :) Still, there could be a search site just for all the checklist sites... (!)


so basically a site where you can share user-made checklists? a wikipedia of checklists?


With tagging and/or search.

Yes.

Think of a household or service disaster, and ask whether it could've been saved/improved by asking the right question at the right time.


Crazy, I had this same idea around the beginning of the year and actually fooled around for a couple hours working on a prototype. It'd be great if someone actually made this :)


all these are create ideas and built into http://chcheck.com -- the focus is also on process and workflow management for small businesses and teams




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