Monthly Archives: July 2013

Our new version: Due Dates, reminders, even better usability

Yes, another update to Kerika! You can now set Due Dates on cards, and get a personalized email summary each morning of all the work items assigned to you that are due today, tomorrow and are overdue.

We implemented Due Dates in a smart way, in keeping with our focus on distributed teams: the system automatically adjusts for people working across multiple timezones. You can read more about this on our blog.

Your personalized work summary is sent at 6AM every day, adjusting automatically for your timezone, to help you organize your day. We think it is a really handy feature, but you can turn it off if you like by setting your user preferences.

Managing your Inbox and your Sentbox (all the invitations and requests that you have sent out, that haven’t been acted upon yet) are both simpler now: there’s a separate blog post describing that as well.

There are a bunch of other usability improvements as well: you will continue to see more over the next few weeks. Thanks for your support: please continue to help us improve Kerika by providing your feedback!

How we handle Date/Time displays (in a very smart way)

We are improving our “smart display” of dates and times, to make sure they are as easy for users to comprehend as possible.

(At this point you might well be wondering: “why is this a problem in the first place? Don’t people know how to read dates or times?”)

The underlying problem we are trying to solve is that “relative time” is more useful than absolute time, if you are dealing with a short time span.

For example, the word “Yesterday” has much more cognitive value than July 19, 2013 (which is also “yesterday”, as of the time this blog post is being written). “Yesterday”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “two hours ago”, “recently”, etc. are all very powerful ways to convey a sense of how far away a particular event is from the current moment.

But, as one of users – Carlos Venegas, from Lean Office Innovation – recently pointed out, this works best for short periods of time: for example, it is helpful to know something that happened “2 days ago”, but much less helpful to be told that something happened “12 days ago”. In the latter case, the cognitive advantage of using relative time disappears and quickly becomes a burden for the user: 12 days ago is too far in the past, and now the user has to do some mental calculation to arrive at the more useful value of “June 10, 2013”.

This issue became more pressing when we built the Due Dates feature, because time doesn’t have an absolute value when you are dealing with a distributed team. For example, the Kerika team is distributed between Seattle and India: a time difference of 12.5 hours in the summer, and 13.5 hours in the winter.

This time difference is large enough to make terms like “today” ambiguous: depending upon when you are talking with your cross-border colleagues, you may have very different ideas of when “today” ends.

To address this, we made our Due Dates feature smart: it automatically adjusts for timezone differences, so that when someone in India marks an item as due “today”, Kerika ensures that people in Seattle understands what that means in terms of Pacific Time.

We also are improving our display of relative time, using a more detailed algorithm:

  • First of all, any time reference that is more than 3 days away is shown in absolute values: e.g. “July 15”, rather than “7 days ago”.
  • The concepts of today, tomorrow, and yesterday are preserved: the system figures out what timezone you are located in, and uses these terms in a smart way.
  • If an item is due by the end of the day, the time is shown using your current timezone: e.g. “11:30AM PST” rather than just “today”, for an item that is supposed to be done by the end of that day in India. This removes misunderstandings that would otherwise exist across timezones.
  • As you get closer to a time, the display gets more precise: anything due within the next hour is displayed in minutes, e.g. “45 minutes”.
  • As you get very close, the display gets a little vaguer, because of the greater uncertainty about when something might actually happen. So anything that’s two minutes away is marked as recently.

All of this makes for a very smart display of time, while keeping the user interface very simple: users set dates using a simple calendar control, without having to worry about the details of where others on the team are currently located, and how they might perceive these values!

Setting Due Dates on cards

With our next release (next week), you will have the ability to set Due Dates on cards; this is how it’s done:

Example of setting a Due Date on a card
Example of setting a Due Date on a card

The concepts are very simple, yet very elegant and powerful:

  • By default, all cards are “Not scheduled”, which means no Due Date has been set. Of course.
  • When you open up a card, you will find a new menu/button that lets you set a Due Date.
  • Due Dates are presented using words where possible, e.g. “Due Today”, “Due 2 days” ago”, etc., since these are easier for people to grasp than actual numbers.

When you set a Due Date, Kerika automatically takes into account your location, so that coworkers in other timezones understand exactly what you mean by “Due Today” or “Due Tomorrow”.

  • For example, if someone in India sets a Due Date for July 19, they expect the task to complete by midnight, July 19, Indian Standard Time.
  • When someone in Seattle looks at that card, they will see that it is due by 11:30AM July 19, Pacific Daylight Time. In other words, Kerika automatically adjusts for the 12.5 hours timezone difference that exists (during the summer) between Seattle and India.

Due Dates are presented right on the card when you are looking at a task board, and hovering over the date with your mouse will show the exact time:

Seeing the Due Date time on a card
Seeing the Due Date time on a card

In this example, the card was due three days ago, at 5PM Pacific Daylight Time.

All of this is done automatically and behind the scenes, in keeping with Kerika’s unique focus on making collaboration easy for distributed teams.

Daily Email Summary

We are introducing a new user preference, set to ON by default, that lets you get a daily summary of your most pressing tasks:

  • All the tasks that are due today.
  • All the tasks that are due tomorrow.
  • All the tasks that are overdue.

You can set the preference like this, by visiting https://kerika.com/preferences:

Preference setting for Due Date emails
Preference setting for Due Date emails

The daily email that you get looks like this example:

Example of a daily email summary of your tasks
Example of a daily email summary of your tasks

This daily email summary will get sent to you at 6AM every day, no matter where you are: Kerika figures out which timezone you are in, and sends you the email so that it’s the first thing you look at when you wake up!

When you are looking at a task board, you can easily spot the cards that are overdue – they are marked in red – and the cards that are due today – they are highlighted in blue. Here’s an example:

Due Dates are highlighted on task boards
Due Dates are highlighted on task boards

This next release is an important step on our way to implementing a Dashboard! Stay tuned…

A simpler way to handle invitations and requests

We have built a simpler way to handle invitations and requests in Kerika, part of a continued (indeed, never-ending!) push to improve usability. A quick recap of what invitations and requests are all about:

Invitations

Invitations are the messages you receive when someone wants to add you to a project team. If you have never worked with someone before, you need to accept their invitation to join a project – to establish a working or “buddy” relationship. This simple mechanism reduces the possibility of you getting dragged onto projects that you have no interest in, or getting involved with people you don’t know.

When you are invited to join a project, you get a (regular) email that looks like this example:

Example of an emailed invitation
Example of an emailed invitation

After you have accepted an invitation from someone, it becomes easier for that person to add you to other projects: we call this an “auto-add”, where they can add you to another project without waiting for your to accept yet another invitation. This makes it easy for you to work with the same set of colleagues and friends without having to wait for them to accept one invitation after another. So, if you are “auto-added” to a second project, you get a notification email that looks like this:

Example of an email sent when you are auto-added to a project
Example of an email sent when you are auto-added to a project

Requests

Requests can be made in a couple of different ways:

You might want to upgrade your role on a project, where you are not the Project Leader or Account Owner. For example, you might be a Visitor on a project, with read-only privileges, who wants to become a full-fledged Team Member. In that case you can easily request an upgrade in your role by using the Project Team dialog box, which is found in the upper-right corner of the Kerika application. Here’s an illustration of how that’s done:

Requesting an upgrade in role
Requesting an upgrade in role

In this example, Betty is currently a Team Member on the project, and is requesting an upgrade to Project Leader. This request for an upgrade in role gets sent to whoever is currently a Project Leader, and the email sent looks like this:

Email sent when someone requests an upgrade in role
Email sent when someone requests an upgrade in role

The other type of request is made when a Team Member wants to add someone else to a project team: this will automatically trigger a request sent to the Project Leader, who is asked for approval since it is Project Leaders who ultimately control who gets to be on the project team. The email sent to the Project Leader looks like this:

Email sent when a Team Member wants to add someone to a project team
Email sent when a Team Member wants to add someone to a project team

What’s new: the Inbox

The email aspect of invitations and requests isn’t changing – although we are looking at ways to reduce the odds of these emails getting trapped by spam filters. What is changing is the way you can access invitations and requests from within the Kerika application itself: we have simplified the user interface to look like this:

The total number of invitations and requests you have outstanding
The total number of invitations and requests you have outstanding

The old envelope icon is being replaced with an orange square that contains the total number of outstanding (pending) invitations and requests you have: in the example above, this is 6.

Clicking on the orange square will bring up a compact display of all your pending invitations and requests organized into an “Inbox” and a “Sent” list:

Example of Inbox
Example of Inbox

In the example above, there are 4 items pending in the Inbox; from top-to-bottom, they are:

  • Betty has “auto-added” Arun to the Marketing Review project; Arun’s gotten a notification to that effect. He can open this project by clicking on the Open Project button, which will remove this item from his Inbox.
  • Betty has a request to invite Sean to the Build a website project. Since Betty is only a Team Member, her invitation has triggered an request for the Project Leader (Arun, in this case) to approve her invitation. If Arun approves Betty’s request, her invitation to Sean will get sent automatically by the system.
  • Betty wants to upgrade her role in the Build a website project from Team Member to Project Leader; this request has gone to Arun who is one of the current Project Leaders. (Maybe Betty wants to be able to add people more easily to this project, without having to wait for Arun’s approval…)
  • Susan has invited Arun to join the Getting Started project as a Team Member.

What’s new: the Sentbox

Clicking on the Sent link would bring up a list of all of Arun’s pending invitations and requests:

Example of Sentbox
Example of Sentbox

In the example above, this includes:

  • A request made to Betty to upgrade Arun’s role in the Getting Started project from Team Member to Project Leader.
  • An invitation to rika@kerika to join the Release 29 project.

The great thing about the Sentbox is that it lets you pull back (i.e. cancel) an invitation or request that you may have made in error, or where you have subsequently changed your mind.

For example, you may have typed in someone’s email address incorrectly when you were adding them to your project – although Kerika’s seamless integration with Google Contacts makes that less likely! – and you would naturally want to cancel that invitation (quickly) before it gets accepted by the wrong person.

To learn more about people and roles in Kerika’s project teams, check out this video:

Our Independence Day release

Amidst all the fireworks of Independence Day (here in the U.S.), we released a new version of Kerika with a bunch of new functionality:

And… over one hundred minor usability tweaks and bug fixes!