All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

Kerika is the only task management tool that's designed specially for global, remote teams.

How Kerika integrates with your Google Contacts

Technology, Usability

When you sign up for Kerika, using your Google ID, you get sent to an authorization screen where Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to access some of your Google-related information. One part of this involves access to your Google Contacts.

We often get queries about this, so we thought we would clarify something that’s really important: we don’t use your Google contacts to spam your friends and coworkers!

The Google Contacts are used for one reason only: to provide an auto-completion of names and email addresses when you are adding people to a project team. Here’s a simple illustration:

Adding people to a project team
Adding people to a project team

To add people to a project team, you would click on the People button, which appears on the top-right corner of the Kerika application, and this would show a display similar to the example above, where all the members of your project team are listed (along with their roles). To add a new person, you would click on the +Member link at the top, and then start typing in a name or email address:

Enter a name or email address
Enter a name or email address

As you type in a name or email address, we pass on this string to Google which tries to match it up with entries in your Google contacts. These entries start showing up immediately, and get filtered progressively as you type in more characters:

Matching names against your Google Contacts
Matching names against your Google Contacts

This matching of names and emails is done by Google, which means Kerika never has direct access to your Google Contacts!

This auto-completion is a handy feature: it eliminates a major source of errors, which is mistyping email addresses. This means that the chances of you inviting the wrong person to your project are much lower!

 

 

A new template for our users: The Business Model Canvas

Technology

We have added a new template for our users: The Business Model Canvas.

The Business Model Canvas is an increasingly popular tool for startups to systematically analyze their proposed business model by identifying:

  • Key Partners
  • Key Activities
  • Key Resources
  • Value Propositions
  • Customer Relationships
  • Channels
  • Customer Segments
  • Cost Structure
  • Revenue Streams

Using this template is easy: when you start a new project, you will find “Business Model Canvas” among the choices for Task Board projects:

Selecting the Business Model Canvas as the template
Selecting the Business Model Canvas as the template

You can also access the template directly at https://kerika.com/m/GFXC, and click on the “Use this template” button on the upper-right corner to get started fast.

Once you start your new project using this template, your task board looks like this:

Using the Business Model Canvas
Using the Business Model Canvas (Click to enlarge)

Each of the main sections of the Business Model Canvas are presented as columns on this task board, and you can customize this as you like:

Customizing the Business Model Canvas
Customizing the Business Model Canvas

Individual cards on this task board are setup and ready for you to fill in; here’s an example:

Individual cards for the Business Model Canvas
Individual cards for the Business Model Canvas (Click to enlarge)

The card shown above, as an example, can be used to identify one of your key suppliers. For this supplier (and for all of your other key suppliers), you should identify the motivations of this supplier: why this supplier would want to do business with you? Motivations could include:

  • Supplier is seeking optimizations and economies of scale
  • Supplier is seeking to reduce risk and uncertainty
  • Supplier is looking to acquire particular resources and activities.

For each supplier, you should identify the key activities that will be performed: this can added to a simple Google Doc, and attached to this card. (We have provided Google Docs templates for individual cards.)

And, finally, for each supplier you should identify the key resources that will be acquired; this can be added to the same Google Doc, or listed separately.

In this way you can easily work through the business model canvases various steps.

Using a process template like Kerika’s is vastly superior to simply printing out a large poster of the canvas, because the cards in the Kerika process template can be used to support conversations, manage content, track status, and collaborate across multiple locations: and that’s just not possible with a paper canvas!

The Business Model Canvas is also gaining popularity within larger organizations that are seeking to adopt (and adapt?) lean startup principles, so we expect that this new template will be of interest to a wide variety of users. And, by the way, creating this template is just part of an ongoing process here at Kerika, to capture and present best practices for a variety of professions and industries!

The right way to do a right-click

Usability

There was a debate recently, within the Seattle Tech Startups email forum, about the pros and cons of offering a right mouse-click option within Web applications.

The right-mouse click is, of course, a desktop paradigm, so the question is: when, if ever, is it a good idea to supersede the browser menu with your own right-click menu?

Here’s where we stand on this issue:

  • Our users want it, overwhelmingly. Because Kerika’s user interface is consciously designed to mimic a desktop application, with simple mouse gestures for dragging cards across a project board or drawing on a canvas, our users naturally expect to have a right-click menu available.
  • Our menu options are better than the browser defaults. The browser defaults are generic, of course, and have little value in the context of the Kerika application. For example, a commonly used browser action might be to select some text and then search for that on the Web. Within the Kerika application, this isn’t a particular useful or commonplace action. If you want to search for something related to a project, you probably want to search within Kerika itself, rather than the entire Web.
  • The right-click menu is always supplemental, never central. We don’t offer anything on a right click menu, in any scenario, that isn’t also available through more explicit buttons or menu options. The right-click menu offers faster actions to commonplace actions, based upon user context, and it is designed for “power users” who want to absolutely minimize their mouse actions. For everyone else, regular menus and buttons offer all of Kerika’s functionality in a more explicit manner.
  • The right-click menu is always contextual, never generic. If you are going to take over the right-click, make it count: don’t offer a generic set of actions, but instead offer a highly tailored, context-sensitive menu of actions. For example, if you are working with shapes on a canvas, the right-click menu offers fast access to changing the appearance of the objects. But if you are working with Web links on a canvas, the right-click menu offers a different set of choices, like switching between a bookmark and an embedded view.
  • The right-click belongs on tablets, too. Something that’s often overlooked in this debate is that the right-click menu is easily accessible on iPads, too: a “long tap” acts as a right-click, so there’s no reason to not make use of that function.

What do you think? Let us know…

Another week, another update: this time, it’s mostly styling (and better user management)

Kerika, Technology, Usability

We are trying to get back to a faster rhythm of releases. Our goal is to have releases within 3 weeks: we want to complete our development and QA within 2 weeks, and then use the third week for “dogfooding” the software.

(As you might expect, we are fervent users of Kerika! Everything related to our business is done using Kerika project boards, and to make sure we are putting out the best possible product, we use a daily build of the software on a test server. This keeps us firmly on the bleeding edge of our own software development: it means that we get to try out our software in a real-life scenario — one that is absolutely mission-critical for the company! — before we pass it on to our users.)

Our newest version, released today, contains a number of under-the-hood fixes that will help us manage our growing number of users. And, we are happy to report, our users are indeed growing: we are adding new users in March at twice the rate we did in February!

From your perspective, it’s mostly some styling and minor user interface changes that will be visible. We have a better way to expose the Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete functions for cards, having heard from too many users that they couldn’t easily figure out how to delete projects, we have more uniform use of colors, and there is a right-click menu for dealing with project cards as well as task cards.

The more uniform use of colors is a step towards a larger update/refresh of our look-and-feel. We have been hearing from users that our user interface is “too grey”, and we are working on that issue. We are also looking at improved notifications, both onscreen and through emails. Stay tuned!

Our new version: even better integration with Google Drive, and even better tablet support

Technology, Usability

Our next release is mostly about improving our Google Drive integration: we are making it a lot easier for you to manage your Google Docs from within Kerika itself, so that your content has a very useful “contextual layer” on top! Here are some of the improvements we be rolling out this weekend:

  • The file organization inside your Google Drive will be a lot more streamlined: a single, top-level folder called “Kerika.com” will have subfolders for each account to which you have access.
  • Better synching between Google Drive and your Kerika projects:
    • If you rename a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, that new name will show up in your Google Drive as well.
    • If you rename a file in Google Drive, that new name will show up in your Kerika cards.
    • If you delete a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, that file will get moved to the Trash in your Google Drive as well.
    • File sharing within your Google Drive will be done at the Kerika project folder level, which means faster performance and a cleaner interface.
    • Duplication of file folders will be eliminated.
  • Content that is attached to cards can be renamed easily: if you rename a file that you attached to a card, this new name will show up in your Google Drive as well, and you will be able to easily rename Web links as well.

We are also improving the Kerika experience on iPads and cellphones: as before, you can access Kerika right from the Safari browser (or Chrome, if you prefer), without having to download any special apps, and we are adding:

  • Better support for “double-tapping”, similar to doing a double click on a desktop.
  • Better support for phones.
  • Improved performance.

General improvements to the user interface will include:

  • A new set of tutorial videos, all under 2 minutes in length, to help you get more out of Kerika.
  • Cut-and-paste of entire projects.
  • Any URLs that are referenced inside cards or on chat messages will appear as clickable links.
  • Content inside chat messages can be easily copied.
  • A cleaner way to customize the workflow for your project.
  • A cleaner layout of icons on cards.
  • Some cool animation effects that make it easier to understand how canvases work, particularly if your projects contain multi-layered canvases (where one canvas contains several others).
  • A new to mark cards as “Needs rework”.

And, a final note: this version has taken quite a bit longer (4+ weeks) that our previous versions, largely because we allowed “feature creep” to happen… We kept adding usability tweaks to the release, particularly with respect to the iPad experience, and that chewed up a whole week. We need to guard more closely against feature creep for our next release.

Coming up: we are adding tagging as a new feature, which will make it easier to create quick filtered views of large projects!

What works for small businesses: LinkedIn, not Twitter

Kerika

A great article from the Wall Street Journal on which social media channels have the most potential to help small businesses: a survey they did resulted in just 3% picking Twitter as the most effective tool.

41% picked LinkedIn, 16% picked YouTube, and 14% picked Facebook. Google+ came in at 7%.

What works for small businesses when it comes to social media
What works for small businesses when it comes to social media

This matches our own sense for what works, and doesn’t, although the 7% that Google+ grabbed seems surprisingly high. Is this because of the increasingly tight integration that Google is enforcing between their search engine results and your usage of Google+? We haven’t seen any benefits at all from our Google+ efforts, and remain frustrated that we still don’t have a custom URL like plus.google.com/kerika…

 

A new Weekly Prioritization template, inspired by Jim Collins’s work

Kerika

Jim Collins, acclaimed author of Build to Last and other well-received books, wrote an interesting blog post about 10 years ago on the importance of creating a Stop Doing list.

Mr. Collins emphasized the importance of deciding not to continue doing something any longer as key to successful prioritization:

A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.

He cited the example of Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark making the critical decision to sell off the company’s paper-mills, which provided the bulk of the company’s revenues and had been in existence for 100 years (!), in order to focus on the new consumer business of paper towels.

This article has inspired us to create a new task board template called “Weekly Prioritization”: it lets you organize your work in a different way from the traditional “To Do / In Progress / Done” taxonomy of Kanban, by using columns organized as:

  • Must Do: in here, put everything that absolutely must get done that week.
  • Should Do: everything that you would really like to get done, once you get all the “must do’s” done.
  • Could Do: stuff you could do, if you had any time left
  • Stop Doing: this is the really critical column — identify everything that you should stop doing!

Let us know how useful this proves to you! (Hat tip to Eitan Nguyen for the suggestion…)

And, as usual, we will continue building new process templates to help our disparate users with their projects.

Coming up: a simpler pricing for Kerika

Kerika

We are moving to a simpler pricing scheme for Kerika:

  • As before, you can start with a free Standard Account, which will let you have two other people work on your projects.
  • Once your team grows past that point, you can upgrade to a Professional Account, which we are offering at a simple rate of $10 per user, per month (billed annually).
  • Academic & Nonprofit users can still request free service, which will now allow for up to 10 free users per account.

Three key changes with our new pricing:

  • You won’t have to buy “packs of licenses” any more: you can buy just as many as you need.
  • The new rate is higher, but reflects the tremendous increase in functionality since our November release of task boards, Kanban boards and Scrum boards.
  • The refund policy is simpler: instead of changing the subscription end-date, you will simply get a refund for the unused portion of any Professional subscription that you had purchased.

Our new pricing will continue to be very competitive, with tremendous value for your money because:

  • There are no limits on the number of projects you can create within an account.
  • There are no limits on the number of cards that you add to a particular project board.
  • There are no limits on the files that you share as part of a card (the size of your Google Drive is entirely between you and Google.)

All of our competitors are offering very complicated pricing schemes that limit your freedom to create and reconfigure projects as needed. But not us.

And, as before, we will continue to use Google Checkout for our billing, which means we will never see or store your credit card information.