Each week we feature an app that has caught our or the Crozdesk community’s attention. We look for exciting features that make our lives easier, apps that take a radical approach to existing problems or a service that has everyone talking about it. In other words: Apps that we think you should know about.
Looking for a project management software?
This week’s featured app is daPulse. daPulse is a simple project management software for startups, enabling their people to work as one team across various locations, timezones, communicate with different employees, and get to know each other over all branches and locations. The main purpose of daPulse is to bridge the gap between personal tasks, and creating a ‘big picture’ of the whole process for everyone involved in the company. Because of this transparency, everyone knows where a project is heading and this helps them to move faster – and in the same direction.
Category: project management, team communications, process development
Users:
Twitter Followers: 3100+
If you have a team or several people to manage, it’s not always easy to have a precise idea of the tasks running. daPulse allows you to have a quick overview of what your team is working on at the moment and to edit, organize, and distribute the tasks among your team. It’s a useful project management software you should consider, if you struggle to be on top of what is happening in your organisation and you can’t figure out where the bottlenecks are hidden. daPulse is for teams.
The review: Let’s get started!
Installation and sign-up process
The sign-up process is simple but takes some time. Visit the website, enter your mail and click on the sign-up button. The app will then ask you to click on the confirmation link send via email to start using it. Now you have to enter your company name and the number of employees. After you have set up your company name on daPulse, you have to provide your personal data: full name, password and phone number (optional). You’re finally done!
We can now explore this project management software together! daPulse offers a little automatic roundup, but let’s take our time and see the functionalities.
UI/ UX
daPulse offers a web application, so it is accessible from any device. Additionally there are mobile applications for iOs and Android. That means you can manage your pulses and get an overview on your team boards from everywhere! To make things short here: the UX is pleasant and instinctive. You quickly know how to use the tools functionalities and find your way around easily in a normal web browser. On mobile devices the dashboard is not as responsive and seems to be a scaled-down version of the desktop view. But I guess that is why their mobile application is made for!
Dashboard overview
On the main dashboard we can now invite other members to daPulse to join our board by simply sending them an email (top right corner). On the left side menu we find all the boards we are currently subscribed to and in the main area all the tasks and their status for the active board.
In the left side menu you can add new boards and folders, which you can name as you like and manage their visibility.
The project management software also offers a useful search bar to find boards, people, and tasks (they call “pulses”). We can search and filter the visible tasks, add columns or comment/ update tasks, that we just finished working on.
1. Filter Pulses by Owner/ Status/ any column item
Click the arrow in the filtering box (above the top group) to filter pulses based on owner, status or anything else. Or, simply type the word you’d like to filter by.
2. Add Notes to the Status Column
Move your mouse to the top right hand corner of any of the labels
Click on the ‘+’ sign that will appear when the corner folds.
3. Mention Teammates to draw their attention
On any pulse, use the ‘@’ symbol before typing the person’s name.
Then choose the person from the dropdown list. The
person will get an email notification with your message.
Integration
daPulse can be integrated with: pipedrive, googledrive, dropbox and directly through email. This makes it easy to handle files or external communcations with clients. Making those visible and accessible to people working on the same project is a huge plus.
Pricing
daPulse offers 4 types of plans that you can subscribe to on a monthly or annual basis: basic, standard, pro, and soon to be entreprise. The pricing depends on the number of users you register on your board. It starts at 25$ per month for a basic plan for 5 users. If you use daPulse as your project management software I find that to be an acceptable price.
Conclusion
daPulse is a great tool for what it aims to do: help teams work more effiently on the tasks at hand. With future development I believe there are many more options on how to further improve the workflow with this app. For exmaple we did not find integration with other team collaboration/communication or personal to-do-list. But these maybe features that daPulse is currenctly working on. I, personally, could see dapulse well integrated with apps like trello or slack to make team collaboration and task managment even easier. I found the interface to be well designed on the desktop version and very much functional when it comes to organizing, prioritising and customizing tasks. Here are some of the major cons and pros, that I would like daPulse to improve/build on:
Cons
- The registration process
The registration process could be even more optimized and shortened. Having a Linkedin, Gmail registration option would be more comfortable. Auto set-up or name suggestion based on account mail info could also help to shorten the registration.
- Website not fully responsive
Though you can view the dapulse web application on mobile, the UX is not perfect: Fonts are too small and you need to navigate on your screen to see the different task or boards. I have not tried the mobile app but I guess it is more optimized for smartphome/tablet use.
Pros
- Quick and easy to configure and start with
Invite your team, create boards and pulse and you’re good to go. You can start using daPulse almost instantaneously.
- Web application Interface & UX
daPulse is instinctive, clear and simple to use. After a few minutes you will be at ease with the project management software. The functionalities are easy to get and to master.
- Available from everywhere
With the web and mobile applications dapulse is accessible at any time from everywhere. It’s perfect for entrepreneurs and leaders always on the move or for remote working.
In conlcusion daPulse is great application to get a big picture view quickly. It gathers everything into one place to see tasks progress, people involved, updates made. Boards are a super fast and easy way to make the things most important to you visible to the whole team. See how things progress, know when things are stuck, know who’s in charge, everything in one place.
With the “Pulse” (the place that connects everyone around a topic), seamlessly communicate, share files, images, designs & specs. Help your team to get organised and make your task management and updates easy. In a few of minutes get to know what is the status of every project in the company.
Manage your team better and get quickly relevant tasks insights with this project management software – Check out daPulse!
