Monthly Archives: October 2018

Our Views feature just got even better

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Usability, , , , ,

We have improved our Views feature to include a simple toggle that lets you filter the entire View to show just those items that are assigned to you.

This new toggle appears on the top-right corner of the View, and we have added a Tip to help you understand the function:

What Needs Attention without filtering
What Needs Attention without filtering

Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:

What's Due with filtering
What’s Due with filtering

All the other items are hidden from the View, and a simple count at the bottom of each column shows you how many items are assigned to others. In the example shown above, 1 item is assigned to someone else, and is due today.

It’s a simple, fast feature that we think shows the best of Kerika’s design approach :-)

This feature has been added to all of our Views that need this:

  • What’s Due
  • What Needs Attention
  • What Got Done
What's Due without filtering
What’s Due without filtering

Making Kerika less chatty for new users

Usability, ,

It’s hard for us to get the balance right between making sure our users don’t miss out on important project updates, while avoiding the impression that Kerika is “too chatty”.

We are changing out default preferences settings — this will affect new users only, not existing users — to have most notifications emails turned OFF by default:

Notification defaults
Notification defaults

One reason for this change is that our Views feature does a good job of providing an overview of important updates across boards — and we are going to make it even better in the near future — so for new users in particular, we don’t want to give the impression that Kerika will increase their incoming emails, rather than actually streamline their existing communications.

Making Kerika less chatty for new users

Usability, ,

It’s hard for us to get the balance right between making sure our users don’t miss out on important project updates, while avoiding the impression that Kerika is “too chatty”.

We are changing out default preferences settings — this will affect new users only, not existing users — to have most notifications emails turned OFF by default:

Notification defaults
Notification defaults

One reason for this change is that our Views feature does a good job of providing an overview of important updates across boards — and we are going to make it even better in the near future — so for new users in particular, we don’t want to give the impression that Kerika will increase their incoming emails, rather than actually streamline their existing communications.

Making Kerika less chatty for new users

Usability, ,

It’s hard for us to get the balance right between making sure our users don’t miss out on important project updates, while avoiding the impression that Kerika is “too chatty”.

We are changing out default preferences settings — this will affect new users only, not existing users — to have most notifications emails turned OFF by default:

Notification defaults
Notification defaults

One reason for this change is that our Views feature does a good job of providing an overview of important updates across boards — and we are going to make it even better in the near future — so for new users in particular, we don’t want to give the impression that Kerika will increase their incoming emails, rather than actually streamline their existing communications.

Squashing even the tiniest bugs is important

Bug Fixes
squashed bug
squashed bug

What have we been up to lately, you ask?

Fixing bugs. Lots and lots of bugs, all minor but we don’t like to have any known bugs at any time.

We recently implemented some new error reporting services so that we can trap server and browser exceptions more efficiently.

This threw up a bunch of errors that we hadn’t been aware of before. Obviously these were minor, since no one had observed any ill effects before, but it’s long been a point of pride for the Kerika team that no known bug gets away alive.

So, we have been cleaning up even minor server exceptions, and obscure Javascript warnings from the browser console, so we have a completely clean slate.

One advantage of having a clean slate is that it makes any new errors immediately more visible. If you get used to ignoring some exceptions/warnings because you know they are not important, your team eventually gets desensitized to the presence of these errors and warnings, and bigger, more important issues start to get ignored as well.

Best to squash all bugs, no matter how small.