REVIEW 📲 ClickUp Mobile App + How I Use it | Dec 2020

So, as you probably know, if you're watching this video, ClickUp has a version 3 of their mobile app. In the past, ClickUp's mobile app was kind of a running joke. Honestly, it just wasn't very good. It wasn't very usable and it was so very slow. This new version is a major step forward towards being mobile friendly and offline friendly, which I know those of you who are working in field positions, sales positions, maybe you're a contractor. This is something you've probably been waiting on before you've been able to really roll out ClickUp in your organization or just for yourself. Because this is going to be a general tour mixed with a review. I'm going to go through each area in the mobile app, which start, starts with home, goes to task, goes to notifications, goes to search, and wraps up with settings. And I'm going to end this video with more of a use case because I like to keep it practical around here. Ooh. And before we dive in, just know that in the description, there is going to be timestamps to each of the moments in this video, because this is going to be a little bit longer. And if you like videos about ClickUp processes, anything in between, definitely subscribe to this channel, because these kinds of videos are coming out twice a week and I wouldn't want you to miss them. So, without further ado, let's dive in. All right, so we're here on an iPhone, and we're going to open the ClickUp 3.0.0 version of the mobile app. First things first, we have ClickUp doing what it does best, soliciting feedback. So if I click on Leave Feedback, it'll actually take me to the embedded candy board that ClickUp uses to keep track of all new features and feature requests below that are your favorites. And there's not really much more here on the home view. I think this is an area that we're going to see built out quite a bit in the few weeks, but I'm okay with that for now. But this is not going to be where you're spending most of your time in the mobile app. Instead, it's going to be in this navigation icon over to the right. Now, if you're used to the web version of ClickUp, this navigation icon is going to throw you off a bit because it's not a consistent icon that we've seen anywhere else in ClickUp, and the word explore is not one that we've ever really heard in the interface. And this is something that ClickUp tends to do. With their new releases, they kind of lose conventions of layout and icons and things get a little bit confusing. So I expect this to be cleaned up in future versions. But for now, just try to remember that this new Compass thing is your sidebar in the web version. So in this navigation area, you've got tasks, docs and favorites. Again, it is so nice and snappy to flip between them. You can click on an individual header to jump to that section, or use your thumb to swipe left and right to jump between each one. To actually see your tasks in the vertical hierarchy of ClickUp, you need to click on the given space. That's what we're seeing here at this high level. If I click on Livestream Hub, which is a space, it'll show me the lists and folders within it, as well as these hidden spaces that I can click open. And then I see folders and I see lists and all that other stuff. To actually see the horizontal hierarchy, you have to click on one of these areas. So you could click on a list, a folder, a space, and you'll be taken into the actual details area. You can flip between the views that you have available, but you cannot create new ones in mobile at this point in time. And you can select any given task to open up the details. You see how it kind of pushes your screen to the left when you're going into the details area. Back at the overall list, you'll see that there's this kind of collapsing icon, which is a little confusing because it's not something that we quite see in the desktop version. So I'm actually going to go to a whole space so we can get a better visual of this. And I'm getting to that space again, not by clicking on the actual area, but by clicking View. All that clicking on versus clicking view all is how ClickUp's differentiating in this mobile app between wanting to actually look at the space level versus just expanding. Oh, and this is your quick reminder. If you haven't given this video a thumbs up and left a comment so the YouTube algorithm knows you're actually enjoying this content, not just falling asleep. Please do that. I would really appreciate it. Back to the video. Once we're into an actual area, this is where it starts to feel weird again. I like the fact that they have these lists kind of broken out and you swipe between them them. The header changes to show you what you're looking at, but it's a little confusing. It's a little. It's easy to get lost at what exactly you're looking at and it's just a really tall structure, like there's a lot of gray space like here, here and here. It just feels like it all could be a lot squatter, if you will. But once you find a task that you do want to work on, you can click on that task and it takes you to the detail area. Now, this is pretty conventional with any task management tool on mobile that you have this detailed view of every single ClickUp task. Up at the very top you have your task title, which you can click on and easily edit. I love that one. Click editing. You've got your list right below it and you can add it to different locations directly from here. Really nice status, which you can click on and it drops down. What's nice and it's hard to convey on video here is when I click on this, it actually gives me a little bit of haptic feedback on the app. So the phone kind of vibrates slightly. Below that is priority assignees, due dates and start dates. So once you scroll past kind of the main information of your tasks, you can get into the description area, which you can click on to open the full on editing pane. Just like Docs and other areas in ClickUp. This is really well designed and it feels really easy to do on your mobile phone. Below that we have tags kind of broken out into their own area. That makes it easy to go through. And then custom fields, all these other ones in this dummy space. There's a lot of them here that you can go through and actually select your values for, which I think is pretty nice. So we can go through and just select a bunch of custom fields. Where it gets a little bit weird is the to do area, which is on the bottom of the page here. And it's actually a little bit hard to get lifted up. I always end up picking up the whole screen by accident. But when you open it up, it breaks down things into three sections of to dos. So you can create a subtask just kind of like that one, just by typing whatever words you want to type. You can add attachments here, priority flags, due dates and other things from this creation menu. And then you have to click this weird comment icon in order to send it. I think that's just something that they need to work out. But again, iconography not consistent here. That this button, which looks like you're about to send a comment, is actually how you send a subtask or create a subtask. Once you create these subtasks of gibberish here, you can click on those subtasks to go inside them and do the same thing all over again. Now, I know in the desktop version of ClickUp, people sometimes get lost when they're inside a subtask of a subtask. I get it. Right. It's hard to see the breadcrumbs. Well, in the mobile version, unfortunately, it's not much better. You can click inside a subtask and then you'll really lose all context of where you are. And unfortunately, there's not a good method to get out of here. Like, if you're in the web version, you can always just say, all right, I'm lost. I'm just going to exit out of this task and go back in from the beginning. With the mobile version, you kind of have to click through the back, top left carrots and, and then swipe down and then swipe over, and then swipe over and then there. Okay, fine. I'm back to civilization. The fact that the bottom navigation isn't constant on ClickUp because they wanted that extra screen real estate, makes it a little bit harder to not lose your way when you're actually working on it. So just keep that in mind. If you're lost, look for that top left corner and find your way back to safety one swipe at a time. It's almost always going to be on the top of your page to navigate back to safety at this point. So that's the basic tasks in ClickUp. We find them by going to the navigation area, finding the area in the hierarchy we want to go to, going to that area and clicking on the task. You should notice that you can't change the status from the main area. You actually have to go into it and then click on it again to mark it complete. This isn't terrible, but it's not exactly the checkbox that you'd expect for something that has just two statuses like this one does. Oh, I should point out, when you're actually in the task area, you can flip over to activity and attachments and the animation to go from overview and activity. Kind of gives me seasickness, but it's there. And you can also attach files from your phone, which is really nice if you're looking to attach images or things that you've downloaded from the Internet or if you just want to have a nice chat conversation. Funny enough, the one place that you'd actually expect a messaging icon, here we have an upload icon. So whoever, whoever the submit buttons, guys, we need, we need to work in the submit buttons. But that's how you do it. And from here you can have standard reactions. They don't have the custom emoji reactions in this, but still very cool. You've got your threaded responses, you can kind of of go back and forth and I would not be surprised if we see a lot more added to this feature because this is really nice how this. I don't know how this feels right now. So that's the basic task layout here. You've got your search, everything that you would expect built in to go back to the overall Explore area. The other tab is Documents like you see here. You can kind of flip between different documents, which I really like. It's just showing you the sidebar right away and you can jump into the particular page of the document that you want, which doesn't quite load properly, but I see what they're going for here. The third piece of the Explorer area is Favorites. Like we talked about at the beginning, this area still has the old icons that used to exist in the web version. I'm assuming they just haven't updated this yet. But this will take you to the favorited views or areas that you have in your ClickUp account, which you've probably set up when you're on the web version. And if you're someone who doesn't really use Favorites or don't really see why they'd be valuable, definitely watch this video where I talk about how I use them. Because especially on mobile, when there's a lot of thumb clicks involved, from getting one spot to another, having Favorites is going to make this whole experience a lot faster, especially if you're going to be a mobile first user of ClickUp. Now to the right there is kind of the Creation menu, and again, this one has a little bit of haptic feedback to it. My phone gives a slight vibration when it actually occurs and what I really like about this one is that when it pops up, it blurs the background and gives us context still. Now from this little windmill effect down at the bottom, you can open up and create reminders which are just your notes to self that are private end up in your inbox. And you can create tasks very simply, or you can click on some of the prompts at the bottom to open up a more detailed window to again have some more options around how exactly you want to create that task or subtasks with it. I like the swipe up and down effect to make a more simple or complex process, but it is once again just. It feels really spacious in not necessarily a good way. Of navigating it. So I think it's going to take a little bit of getting used to just to not feel like you're constantly, constantly scrolling to actually see what the heck you're doing. But again, you're going to click the send message button in order to create your task. And at the top, you'll have that toaster alert up here that says your task has been created, which is pretty cool to have that pop up and remind you of what's been going on. Now, I should point out that there are watchers as well in the app. I like how clear it is. Again, though, the labeling is confusing. So even though it says users here, this is not users who have access. This is not users who are assigned. This is Watchers. And I just want to pop in here with a fun fact. I've noticed that in some of ClickUp's documents, their help docs on their website, which are awesome, they start mentioning watchers, the people who get notified about task changes as followers. They use that term, which makes me think maybe they've heard what we've been talking about on this channel and how watchers is a really stupid and confusing term and they're going to flip it to something more conventional. Oh, and if you haven't watched the Watcher video, you can watch it here. Now, after we get beyond this area, we've got to the right and we have our notifications. Now, I think this notifications area is excellent. I really like how the refresh loads. It's exactly like you'd expect it to be. You've got all of your reminders up there and then your tasks overdue kind of collapse out into their own menu, just like we've seen across the board in this app. When you click to open a container, that container pushes to the left and you go into the details of it on the right. And I like that there's this hovering clear all button right in the middle. It might have been nice to have it slightly higher contrast, but either way it's nice. One thing to watch out though, is just the fact that once you clear it, it's very, very quick. For an app that includes a lot of excessive animations, it's a little bit hard to remember. Wait, did I clear that? Where did it go? I don't know. But if you do get a little thumb happy and start clearing things accidentally, there is a filter icon in the top right which will allow you to go to a specific area of your notifications, just like on the web version. So here I Could go to cleared. I could find the missing notification, which again, how fast that loads is awesome. It doesn't seem to let me unwind it from here, but at least I can find it. Just some small notes on this. The fact that it's a filter icon, don't let it fool you, it doesn't actually work like a filter. It might have been better to just be a hamburger menu because really it's flipping you between different areas. It's not actually more of a toggle style filter. And another thing to watch out because I did this at least once when I started using the mobile app. This Clear all notifications is. It seems like something you should press and you probably don't want to press it, so just keep that in mind. Done is the button you want to click or just swipe down if you are done checking your notifications. Because if you click the clear all you're going to clear every single notification you have whether you read them or not. And that clear all notifications is really close to cleared. So I just wanted to call that out for you guys before you make the same mistake I did when I started playing with this. Now wrapping up the navigation bar, there is search over to the right hand side and this is just a simple search. You type in whatever you want. You filter by whether it's a task, a file or just anything in your workspace and you look for your result. So here I'll look for the word pick because I know we just saw something. It loads a little bit. There we go. It's looking up all my tasks for the word pick. It's also looking at my documents and my files and all that good stuff. So back to the home here in the bottom left corner, let's go up to Settings and just give this a quick look to make sure that everything's doing what we want it to do. Up here in the top left you can see your name in case you forgot the company name. And you could flip between different accounts that you have. Dark mode you can adjust here, which is nice. There's also support, but strangely if you click that, it just prompts you to send an email, which is a little strange. And then the version of the app that you're on. And again we're here in 3.0.0. By the time you watch this, hopefully the app is going to be a lot cooler and even better than what I'm showing you here today. And as promised, I want to end this video with kind of an example of how I use this new mobile app and how it's really changed my workflow because I don't use my social media for personal use, my algorithm, my feed is entirely business, which means my entire feed is people who market or paying for ads or who are in groups I'm in. And it's always filled with great questions from the clickappers Facebook group, great conversations from our Facebook group, which, if you haven't joined, go join that. So what I typically do when I'm on social media, just scrolling through, you know, just killing time, is I'm taking tons of screenshots. I'm taking screenshots of copy I like. I'm taking screenshots of ads, strategies, questions that I think would be really cool to cover here on the channel. I have a lot of screenshots from being on social media, and previously I would have to forward those screenshots into ClickUp as reminders, because that was the only way that you were able to do that. But now my workflow is a little bit different. In this version, you can actually go into the mobile app, click ClickUp, and when you do that, you can create a task in a specific location directly from an image or screenshot. I can't even tell you how much more organized my Inbox now is because I'm actually able to file things as I go, which is something I recommend you do for Google Chrome too. Because I can file things as I go, I don't have to worry about having that big backlog that I then have to sort out of Inbox now. That's how the ClickUp app really changed my workflow. How's it going to change yours? I want to just give you some concluding thoughts here to summarize all the stuff that we talked about here. The ClickUp mobile app is a perfect example of superior function and questionable style. And personally, I'm okay with that compromise. As you can imagine, I'm sure many of you, if you're a ClickUp user, you're kind of used to making that concession. You can get a powerhouse tool. It's not always the prettiest, but who cares? It gets the job done in a really good way. And what's so amazing about this particular app, and why I'm okay conceding things like consistent icons, tooltips, maybe some excessive animations. I'm okay with those compromises is because this tool was created by ClickUp. And if there's one thing we know about ClickUp, it's that they release and update things. Often. Their iteration cycle is 13 times faster than the industry average, they're releasing updates every single week. And so I have no doubt that the mobile app we see today is going to be way different than the mobile app you are seeing on your screen if you are following along with this tutorial. Previously, if there was a team that needed offline mode or they needed to be mobile first, I would steer them away from ClickUp. It just wasn't palatable. Today I would say you can do it. Maybe wait until January, February 2021 just to make sure some of these really silly bugs are worked out so that way your team isn't stressed out by them. But otherwise, click up. I deem you as mobile ready. So until next time, until our next video. I hope you guys all enjoy the process.