Board display and swimlanes

Filters decide which tasks you see. Display decides how they are arranged. They are separate controls, and mixing them up is why people end up with six near-identical views.

Open Display on any board or list to find everything on this page.

Group by

Grouping picks the axis your columns (or list sections) are built from. The default is status, which is the classic kanban.

Group by	The board becomes
Status	The workflow. Where everything is.
Assignee	A load chart. Who is buried, who is free.
Priority	A triage queue.
Label	Work by theme.
Type	Bugs beside features.
Sprint	What is committed where.
Module	Work by area of the product.
Creator	Who is filing all this.

Grouping by assignee once a week is the cheapest way to spot an overloaded teammate before they tell you.

Sub-group — the swimlanes

Sub-grouping splits each column a second time, into horizontal swimlanes.

Group by status and sub-group by assignee, and you get the workflow across the top and one lane per person down the side. Every cell answers “what is Marina doing that is in review?” without a filter.

Two rules worth knowing:

• Swimlanes are a board feature. A list has sections, not lanes.
• Sub-grouping by the same axis you already grouped by does nothing, so dotby ignores it rather than drawing empty lanes.

Good pairings:

Group by	Sub-group by	Answers
Status	Assignee	Who is stuck where
Status	Priority	Is the urgent work actually moving
Assignee	Status	One person’s whole pipeline
Module	Status	Which area of the product is blocked

Sort

Sorting orders tasks inside each group. dotby sorts by more than one rule, in order, so ties break the way you meant.

A common one: priority, then due date. Urgent work floats up, and within urgent, the thing due Friday beats the thing due next month.

Manual order is also a sort. Drag cards where you want them and the board keeps that arrangement.

Show sub-tasks

Sub-tasks can appear as cards of their own, or stay tucked under their parent.

Turn them on when the sub-tasks are real assigned work people pick up. Turn them off when they are checklist steps and showing them triples the size of your board for no new information.

There is a related switch under hide closed work: keep completed sub-tasks visible under a parent that is still open, so a nearly-finished task does not look untouched.

Card fields

Choose what a card actually shows — assignee avatar, priority, labels, estimate, due date, sprint, the task number, your custom fields.

A board you scan from across the room wants three fields. A board you work from wants six. It costs nothing to change, so tune it to the job.

Fold a column

Any column collapses to a slim strip with a live count. Done stops eating a third of the screen, cards still drop onto it, and progress numbers do not change.

Admins pick which statuses start folded for everyone; each person can fold or unfold whatever they like, and the choice sticks.

All of it is savable

Every control here is part of a view — layout, filters, grouping, sub-grouping, sort, card fields, all under one name and one tab.

That is the point. Instead of one board that everyone re-configures all day, make three:

• Flow — group by status, sub-group by assignee
• Load — group by assignee, sort by priority
• Triage — filter to no-assignee, group by priority

See Projects and views.

Next

• Filters and search — deciding what is on the board in the first place.
• Projects and views — saving the result.
• Bulk actions — acting on what you arranged.