Visual Encoding

Visual Encoding in Targetprocess supports color-coded highlighting of cards on boards and timeline views and lanes in lists according to custom rules and conditions.

Requires Targetprocess 3.6.1+ (Multicolor and custom color support are added in 3.7.0)

Color-coded highlighting

You can highlight cards on the Views using your own rules. It works for all View zoom levels except the smallest level.

To set up Visual Encoding on your view, access Actions > Encoding menu option. Visual Encoding tab looks like this:

Advanced Filters for custom rules and conditions

To specify rules use the same syntax as for Filters.

Supported Colors

You can choose color from palette or set your own manually.

Usage of multiple rules and conditions together

If you have several rules applicable to the card, it will be highlighted with first three colors.

In this case, "About Us page" card meet all rules but it is highlighted with three colors, and doesn't highlighted with color of the fourth rule.

You can also prioritize rules via drag-n-drop to determine the rules' order of importance.

There is no option to apply only first matching rule. As a workaround it is possible to exclude condition of the first rule from the second rule using AND, OR, NOT logical operators and brackets.

Examples

You can specify different color saturation to highlight cards by property in order of importance. For example, you can use the following rules for Business Value. The greater the Importance, the more saturated color will be applied.

You can also use color saturation to highlight some intervals of property. For example, for Effort property you can use the following set of rules. And it shows which Feature has User Stories with greater Effort.

Another use case is highlighting by Tags:

You can highlight cards that have too long of a Cycle Time:

People who work a lot, have more than 10 items and have Allocation greater than 100%:

User Stories with a few Bugs and with a lot of Bugs:

You can highlight a specific card by Name or by Id:

Highlight Requests by Email and Phone source types:

For Progress use values from 0 to 1:

And, of course, you can mix all the rules:

It is not possible to apply color to whole lanes on board views, only cards can be highlighted.

It also works at Timelines:

And it works for Lists (only on the cards level, not hierarchy levels yet):

Reuse of encoding rules

Once you configured Visual Encoding custom rules for one of your views, we recommend you to save the view as a template. New views can be created from this template in future.

Global visual encoding rules

Since version 3.11.1 it’s possible to create a predefined set of global Visual Encoding rules that can be applied to all views and all users.

To do this, simply select the corresponding checkbox in the Visual Encoding tab...

...and add the global rules that you want applied to every view in the system:

This setting can be managed only by Administrators; other users can see it in read-only mode.

Visual Encoding by size

The idea to make it possible to adjust size of cards according to complexity or total effort has been suggested for our public backlog, however, the development has not been started yet.