Where dates are shown on Kerika’s boards and cards, we try to show them in relative terms rather than absolute terms.

For example, if something was updated today, we use the word “Today” instead of the actual date.

There’s a simple reason for that: relative times and dates are much easier for people to comprehend than absolute values. In other words, it’s much easier for someone to comprehend “5 minutes ago” than “Dec 30 2014 3:58PM PST”.

Absolute dates and times may be more accurate, but relative values are a whole lot easier to process for regular humans.

One problem we had with our display of relative times, however, was that they were not continuously updating — instead, they relied upon the page being refreshed in order to show the most accurate relative time description.

For example, if something was updated “2 minutes ago”, the phrase would remain displayed on the screen for a long time, if the page was never refreshed. This obviously can lead to confusion, since users are not going to be aware of when they last refreshed a page.

With our newest release, we have fixed that problem: relative times will still be in use, but they will update themselves automatically, so that “5 minutes ago” will soon become “10 minutes ago” and then “1 hour ago” without the user having to do anything.

Another nice improvement in Kerika’s usability!