Card ergonomics: how much information per card is too much

Open your board, look at any card without clicking it, and ask yourself three questions in order: what is this work? (one-line title), who's responsible right now? (current-phase owner), is it healthy? (overdue / blocked / on-track). If you can answer all three in under three seconds without opening the card, the ergonomics are right. If even one requires a click, the card is under-designed for the role it plays in daily reading.

The right minimum is small. Title (concrete, customer-recognisable). Current owner (avatar or initials of the person responsible for this phase, not the original assignee). Health glyph (a single visual: green = on-track, amber = approaching duration, red = overdue, grey = blocked). That's the whole surface most boards need. Optional add-ons: priority chip, deadline date if it's tight, a single tag if your taxonomy is small enough that one tag identifies category. Anything else lives behind the click.

Five recurring offenders. The full date stack (created, started, due, completed) - one date is signal; four are noise. Every assignee ever - the original assigner, the current owner, the QA reviewer, the deliverer - shown as a row of four avatars. The current-phase owner is the only one that matters at glance. Tag soup - 5+ tags per card; the eye stops reading them. Description preview - a 200-character preview of the card body; never load-bearing on the surface, always cluttering. Custom field salad - every Asana / Notion-imported field shown on the surface because the import couldn't decide which were important. The migration is the right time to drop them.

A practical heuristic. Zoom the board to 50% in your browser. Can you still read the cards' load-bearing information - title, owner, health? If yes, the ergonomics scale. If at 50% the cards become illegible, you're relying on detail that won't survive a busy day on a real screen. Most production teams should design for the 50% zoom case; the 100% zoom is for the moment you click in to do work, not for the moment you scan to plan.

{PRODUCT}'s card surface is intentionally narrow: title, current-phase owner, health glyph derived from phase duration + blocked state, with the priority chip optionally enabled. The description, comments, attachments, and full audit log live behind the click. We've watched too many production boards drown in surface noise; the discipline is set by the default rather than left to the team's restraint.