Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general

Adding a Google Map to your Kerika canvas

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, , , , ,

Did you know that you can embed a Google Map in your Kerika Whiteboards? It’s easy: just copy the Google Map’s URL:

Adding a Google Map to Canvas
Adding a Google Map to Canvas

And paste it into the dialog box that appears when you click on the “Add Web Content” button on your canvas toolbar:

Add Web Content
Add Web Content

Kerika automatically figures out the URL refers to a Google Map, and shows you an embedded map on your canvas:

Example of embedded Google Map
Example of embedded Google Map

You can do the same thing with card attachments, for your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: Kerika shows a small thumbnail of the map in the list of attachments on your card:

Example of attached Google Map
Example of attached Google Map

 

UI tweak: removing the “Add member” button from card details

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

As part of our work on combining tags and colors, we have been cleaning up parts of the Kerika user interface that had minor inconsistencies.

One such inconsistency — in our view — was that you were able to add people to a project team from within the card details dialog itself:

Adding people to a team
Adding people to a team

This button has been there in Kerika for a very long time, but it doesn’t really make sense to have this capability within the card details dialog: it just isn’t the best place to decide to add someone to a project team.

Instead, in our new layout the Project Settings dialog consolidates all the board management in one place, including adding people to a team, changing someone’s role within a team, and removing someone from a team:

 

UI tweak: showing attachments in chronological order

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, Usability, , , ,

It used to be that when you added content to a card — files from your laptop or Web content from your Intranet or the Internet, or a canvas — the newest content was added at the top of the list.

Of course, you could always rearrange them, by grabbing and dragging them up or down the list, but this it not a feature that many users discovered on their own :-(

Rearranging attachments on a card
Rearranging attachments on a card

Well, for greater consistency with how the chat and history are shown within a card’s details, we are now going to show attachments in chronological order as well — the latest files and URLs that you added to a card will appear at the bottom of the list, and the view of these will be automatically scrolled to show the latest items:

 

Using Chat in Kerika

Technology

A new tutorial video, showing you how Kerika’s Chat combines the best of instant messaging and email, and lets you have very focused conversations on your Task Boards, Scrum Boards and Whiteboards:

 

Using animation to provide a “sense of place”

Technology, Usability

Animation often gets a bad reputation, and often this reputation is well deserved because too many designers and developers use animation gratuitously: just because they can, or just because they want to show off their technical skills.

At Kerika we have been very cautious about using animation, and have generally restricted its use to scenarios where it can help give users a “sense of place”: providing transitions from one display to another, so that a user has a sense of having journeyed from one part of the system to another.

Animations are particular useful when returning to where you come from: an effective animation can help users understand that they have returned from their journey.

Using animation to unfold drop-down dialogs helps the user understand that the dialogs are literally unfurling on top of the Task Board or Scrum Board: in other words, the user isn’t going anywhere different, just unfolding another display for temporary use.

With our latest version, we added some more animation: now, when you open a card on your Task Board or Scrum Board, it will appear to literally open in front of your eyes.

Animation is also used when you close a card: it appears to collapse in front of you in a way that draws your eye to its position within a crowded column.

This kind of animation, we believe, is useful rather than gratuitous: it helps the user understand what is happening when she opens or closes a card.

(We may consider some other touches of animation where we think it could help provide useful transitions, but we have to be mindful of the performance hit of animations as well…)

An improvement to Card History

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, Usability, , , ,

Every card, on every Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, contains within it a full history: a log of all the changes that have been made to it.

(A few actions are ignored because they can occur so often, and are often inconsequential, e.g. moving a card up/down within the same column. In contrast, moving a card across columns is considered consequential, and is therefore logged in the card history.)

We recently made a usability improvement in the way the Card History appears: the log of changes is now shown in chronological order, rather than reverse chronological as was the case before.

This makes history look more like chat, and should make it more usable!

Easier to tell who moved a card to your board’s Trash

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

When a Team Member deletes a card, it just gets moved to the board’s Trash; it doesn’t get immediately deleted from Kerika’s database even though it disappears from your view right away.

That’s because the “delete” action in Kerika is really a “move to Trash” action: you are removing something from view, but not necessarily getting rid of it for good.

Any Team Member can delete a card, but only a Project Leader can completely and permanently get rid of it — in other words, “taking out the trash” is one of the privileges reserved for Project Leaders (and Account Owners).

The Trash column is normally not shown on your Task Board or Scrum Board, but you can bring it view easily by clicking on the Filter button:

Making Trash visible
Making Trash visible

 

With our latest version, it’s easy to see who moved the card to the Trash: we show this right on the card itself.

Seeing who deleted a card
Seeing who deleted a card

“In Progress”: a new Kerika feature

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, , , , , ,

We are adding “In Progress” as a new status tag for cards, on Task Boards and Scrum Boards, that we think will make it easier for everyone to see which items are actually moving along.

In Progress
In Progress

Couple of reasons why we did this:

  • People get assigned too many cards sometimes, even when they are working with a “Pull” model (as opposed to “Push”), sometimes even using Work-in-Progress (WIP) Limits don’t solve the problem of easily seeing exactly what’s being worked on at any time.
Template example
Template example

In this process template, we have three buckets of activities: Background Check, IT & Facilities Setup, and Onboarding, and we have a separate In Progress column that you could use to indicate which card is currently in progress.

But, with a “In Progress” status indicator on cards, you wouldn’t need that extra column: you could work on cards from any of those three buckets and indicate their status right there. And when the work gets completed, these cards can go straight to Done!

Filtering by People: a new feature

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

When you are working with a large board and a large team, it’s often useful to see just those cards that are assigned to some people.

For example, you might want to just see those cards that are assigned to you, so that you can focus on getting your stuff done and not get distracted by everything else that’s going on.

With our newest release of Kerika, we have made this both possible and easy.

One quick menu choice, within our new Filter dialog, will make it possible for you to filter your view of a Task Board or Scrum Board to just see the items assigned to you:

Just my items
Just my items

If you are a Project Leader, you might want to filter your view of a board even further, and Kerika makes that easy:

Filter by People
Filter by People

 

This view is particularly handy if you are trying to deal with staffing issues: for example, if one person has called in sick, you can first filter your view to show just the items assigned to that person, and then add more cards to your view to see how busy someone else on the team is, if you are thinking of offloading the sick person’s work to someone else.