Board anatomy: columns, cards, swimlanes and views

Every board in Laya is built from the same parts: columns that represent statuses, cards that represent work items, optional swimlanes that group cards horizontally, and a strip of view tabs that change how the same work is laid out. Once you know these parts, every board — native, connected or master — feels familiar.

Columns and statuses

Each column on a board is a status, and every status belongs to one of five buckets shown in board Settings as To do, In motion, Done, On hold and Dropped. Buckets tell Laya what a status means, so features like reporting and cross-tool sync can treat “In review” and “In progress” both as work in motion.

New boards start with sensible columns: a Kanban board seeds Backlog, In progress, Done and On hold, while a Scrum board seeds To do, In progress, In review and Done. You can rename, add and remove statuses from board Settings at any time.

• Set a WIP limit on a column to make overload visible.
• Collapse a column you are not working in — it stays collapsed for you.
• Drag a column edge to resize it; widths are remembered per person, per board.

Cards and their fields

A card is one work item. Exactly eleven card fields can be shown or hidden per board, and all are visible by default: priority, status pill, type glyph, assignees, due date, tag chips, subtask progress, display ID, effort points, epic link and sprint. You control field visibility in Board Studio on the Cards tab.

Clicking a card opens its detail panel with the description, attachments, relations, subtasks and discussion — see Creating and editing work.

Priorities

Laya uses six priority labels across boards: Urgent, High, Medium, Normal, Low and No priority. Priority appears on the card (as bars, a dot or a label, depending on the board's style), and you can filter and group by it.

Swimlanes (grouping)

The board's grouping picker offers exactly six options: None, Source board, Epic, Assignee, Priority and Sprint. Grouping splits the board into horizontal swimlanes so you can read one epic, one person or one sprint at a time.

• A master board opens grouped by Source board; every other board opens ungrouped. This is only a default — your own choice is remembered per board in your browser and wins on later visits.
• Drag swimlanes to reorder them, collapse lanes individually, or collapse and expand them all with one control. Lane order is remembered per person, per grouping.

The view tabs

The strip above the board switches between four layouts — Board, Table, Calendar and Timeline — and also carries entries for Backlog and Epics, which open the board's planning pages. The active layout is carried in the URL, so a link you share opens in the same view.

For a deeper look at each layout, filters and sorting, see Views, filters and grouping.