In the recently added Highlights feature, we let you create your own custom highlights:
We fixed a problem where “This Week”, “Next Week”, etc. wasn’t including Overdue Tasks and cards, which could give users a somewhat misleading impression of what they needed to get done in a particular week or month.
After all, if something is already overdue, you will need to get that done this week along with anything that’s scheduled for this week!
We fixed a bug that was kind of annoying: if you had a Custom Highlight defined for one board, and then switched to another open board, the Custom Highlight was getting applied automatically to the second board as well.
This happened only if people used the Board Switcher button that appears on the top left of the Kerika app:
The Board Switcher keeps track of all your open boards and is a fast way to switch between them if you are working on several different projects at the same time — you don’t have to go back to the Home page to find your boards again and again.
Every of your open boards can have Highlights set, or not, as you like. This bug fix makes that a smoother process.
We really like the Tasks feature that we introduced recently: this has significantly cut down on the number of cards that we have to track on boards, since many items can be easily captured, assigned and scheduled as tasks rather than independent tasks.
This means we have a better, epic-oriented view of our boards; we don’t get lost in the weeds.
However, the first implementation of the styling could do with some improvement, so that’s what we did:
This makes it easier to see the names of people assigned to cards, and the due dates, more easily.
By the way, it took a surprising amount of experimentation before we settled on these colors: in Kerika’s design every color is supposed to have a particular meaning, so that colors appear in a consistent context in every instance.
For example, if we use blue to indicate a clickable link — like we do on the card details left tab, to let you switch between Tasks, Attachments, Chat, etc. — we can’t use blue anywhere else where it wouldn’t be clickable.
So, if blue is clickable in one place, it must always be clickable everywhere else.
This is easy enough, but we also have rules about using colors consistently across actions or displays that seem related, again to minimize the learning effort needed by new users.
Our green is used for Highlights in a consistent way:
The breadcrumbs includes the suffix “What’s Assigned to Me” in green, the Highlights button is green to indicate that it is in use, and a green button is used to indicate that items matching the highlight are out of view.
If we are rigorous about this, there is an internal consistency about the Kerika user experience that makes it easier to learn. But it takes a lot of discipline.
So if consistency applies a bunch of constraints in our choice of colors, so do legibility and color-blindness: we have to be careful to avoid using color combinations like red and green that are difficult for some people to distinguish. (About 8 percent of males, and 0.6 percent of females, are red-green color blind in some way or another, whether it is one color, a color combination, or another mutation.)
All of this means that it isn’t easy to pick a new color when we design!
We have replaced the old Filters feature for our Task Boards and Scrum Boards with a new Highlights feature that we think is better in every way!
Click on the Flashlight icon on the top right corner of the Kerika app:
And you will see this menu of actions:
The default is No highlights. We have a couple of built-in highlights that we know you will find useful right away:
Here’s how the Highlights work:
A shadow effect helps spotlight all the cards that match the highlight, making them literally pop out of the screen!
If you are working on a board with a lot of columns, there’s always a chance that something that is being highlighted is currently out of view — if, for example, it is near the bottom of a long column.
Kerika takes care of that as well: if a card that matches your highlight choice is currently out of view, a green button appears at the top or bottom, as needed, of each column to indicate that there are cards out of view that match your highlight.
The green arrow acts as more than just an indication that you need to scroll: it is also a button that will scroll the column to show you the next card that you need to see.
(Pretty cool, huh?)
We will be adding more smart highlights in the coming weeks, but in the meantime you can also create your own custom highlights:
A Custom Highlight can include any combination of people assigned to cards, status, due dates and tags.
For the due dates, we have offered several smart options that are a lot easier to use than standard date pickers:
These ways of specifying due dates — like “Due Next Week” or “Next Month” — make it even easier to set up a custom highlight.
Enjoy.
Our introduction of lazy loading, as part of our recent redesign, was originally limited to just three columns: Backlog (for Scrum Boards), Done, and Trash.
We figured that these columns were most likely to be very long, and would therefore benefit the most from implementing lazy loading.
This worked well; so well, in fact, that we have expanded our use of lazy loading to work with all columns, across all Task Boards and Scrum Boards.
The practical effect of this should be to reduce the time needed by the browser to load large boards, for all users, on all kinds of computers.
Enjoy.
We have added a new feature to our Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can now manage a list of tasks for each card on a board, like this:
Every card can have as many tasks as you like, organized in a simple, smart checklist.
Individual tasks can be assigned (to one person at a time) and scheduled, and Kerika is smart about rolling up these assignments and due dates to reflect them on the card as well:
As you mark off tasks as Done, they slide to the bottom of the list to make it easy to see what remains to be done.
We are extending the Column Actions menu (featured in a previous post) to provide a quicker, easier way to hide (or show) individual columns on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards:
When a column is hidden, it’s name is shown vertically, so you can easily remember which columns you have hidden at this time.
Revealing columns that are hidden is easy: just click on the “eye” button and the column immediately comes back into view.
Every Team Member can decide whether to show or hide individual columns: their choices won’t affect the way other Team Members choose to view the same board.
We have a new process template that you can use to create Customer Journey Maps, based upon some great articles written by the Nielsen Norman Group.
This template contains all the step you need to create your own Customer Journey Map, along with links to articles on the subject from the Nielsen Norman Group.
It’s part of our “Creative Stuff” category of process templates, which includes the Google Design Sprints as well.
Kerika’s integration with the Box Platform: a customer’s perspective on how sweet it is…
Kerika with the Box Platform: a Customer’s Perspective from Arun Kumar on Vimeo.
Welcome to 2017! We have a big bunch of goodies lined up for release in the coming weeks and months, and we are going to start off with some nice improvements to the 6AM Task Summary email that you can (optionally) get from Kerika:
You now have two options: you can get all your overdue and due items sorted by date, or by board. Or both.
To turn this on, go to https://kerika.com/preferences, and check these boxes:
We have also improved the “group items by date”: instead of showing what’s due today and tomorrow, this email now includes What’s Due This Week and What’s Due Next Week.
“This Week” is adjusted automatically as the week progresses to keep track of what’s left for the current week, which always ends on Sunday.
Enjoy.