Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general

Cut/Copy/Paste of Projects may be a bad idea

February 14, 2014Technology, UsabilityAccount, Usabilityuser

We currently have a function to let you Cut/Copy and then Paste a project from one account to another, but it’s starting to look like this is a bad idea because it is very difficult to implement cleanly.

The underlying problem is that a project is more than a collection of cards: it is also part of a network of people relationships, connections to other projects, etc., and these can’t all be moved cleanly from one account to another.

For example, consider a series of projects that are organized as Scrum Boards, linked to a shared Backlog within one account. If we copy and paste one of these projects to another account, what exactly should happen to that Backlog? It’s not an easy matter to simply copy the entire Backlog over as well, to the new account — that may not be the most sensible outcome in all, or even most, circumstances.

Consider an even more basic problem: a project has a bunch of folks working on it today. If you copy and paste the project to another account, what should happen to this team? These folks may not have previously been part of the new account’s team: they would have to get invited to join projects in that account, and very likely the new account’s owner would have to upgrade her account to support the larger team size.

There a bunch of conundrums like this to work through, and it’s not clear that this is even worth the considerable effort it would take to create a bullet-proof solution – how often, after all, do people need to move a project from one account to another?

If the answer is “not very often”, then it’s probably better for us to remove this functionality, rather than leave users with a less-than-great experience…

Google+ isn’t ready for world domination

February 12, 2014TechnologyKerika

We just spent an hour trying, fruitlessly, to set up a “Google Hangout on Air”, and about the only thing we can conclude is that all those folks who are worried about Google’s plan for world domination can relax: Google isn’t close to having a single ID to track everyone.

In order to do a Hangout on Air (a public Hangout, that up to 10 people? can view), you need to have a YouTube channel connected to your Google+ account.

Well, we do have a YouTube channel for info@kerika.com, and Google+ account, also for info@Kerika.com, but that’s not good enough for Google which keeps providing this singularly unhelpful message:

Trying (and failing) to start a Google Hangout

Clicking on the “Click here to get started” link, which you might reasonably expect to take you to a control panel screen of some sort, just takes you down a wild-goose chase of outdated help pages from Google. These help pages have clearly not kept up with UI changes at YouTube, nor even with UI changes on Google+ itself.

Trying to make sure our Google+ profile is complete doesn’t help either: Google+ tells us that our profile is 85% complete, and that we have done everything we need:

Pretty painful experience; we are going to stick with GoToMeeting for now.

One of our patents is getting referenced by others

February 11, 2014Intellectual Property, Kerika, Technologyuser

We just realized that one of our patents, US Patent No. 7,958,080, is getting referenced by other inventors:

Patent	Applicant	Title
US8214313	Ford Motor Company	Turn rate calculation
US8489647	IBM	Use-case based configuration of an object-relational mapping framework
US8543785	Microsoft	Protocol for managed copy of media content
US20080028170	Microsoft	Protocol for Managed Copy of Media Content
US20110137763	Dirk Aguilar	System that Captures and Tracks Energy Data for Estimating Energy Consumption, Facilitating its Reduction and Offsetting its Associated Emissions in an Automated and Recurring Fashion
US20120054227	IBM	Use-case based configuration of an object-relational mapping framework

Well, this is interesting…

How to delete (and later retrieve) projects

February 5, 2014TechnologyAccount, Trashuser

Here’s a quick primer on how to delete projects you are no longer working on, and how to retrieve them later from your Trash (think “Recycle Bin” if you are a PC user) if you change your mind.

The first point to note is that closing a project is not the same as deleting it: when you are looking at your Boards view, you can have several projects open, each in its own tab. If you hover over any of the project tabs, you will see an “x”: clicking this will close the project.

This is a lot like closing a browser tab: it doesn’t kill the website that you were viewing; it just means you are no longer viewing it yourself. In the same way, closing a project tab doesn’t delete the project.

If you actually want to delete a project, click on the “Projects” button, in the top-left corner of the Kerika app (as shown above), and you will see a list of all your projects:

Here, you can select an individual project, and then Cut, Copy, or Delete it:

These buttons also appear when you use your right-mouse button, while working on a desktop or laptop:

If you click on the Trash button (or select “Move to Trash” from the right-click menu), your project will get deleted.

Deleted projects go into a Trash, which is like a Recycle Bin: you can retrieve it later if you change your mind or make a mistake.

The Projects Trash appears just above your list of projects:

Whenever a project is moved to the Trash, the Project Trash button glows orange, briefly, to alert you. Click on the button and you will see a list of all the projects that are in your Projects Trash:

You can now select an individual project, and choose to either restore it, or delete it permanently:

So, that’s it: a simple way to delete projects, and retrieve them later if you made a mistake.

Something better than Google Contacts

January 24, 2014Technologyuser

We are replacing our integration with Google Docs with a “friends of friends” model.

The Background:

For the past 2 years, Kerika has offered an “auto-completion” feature that let you type just a few characters of someone’s name, and then have a list of matching names and emails appear from your Google Docs. It looked like this:

This was actually a very helpful feature, but it was also scaring off too many potential users.

The Problem:

When you sign up as a new Kerika user, Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage your Google Contacts”. This was a ridiculous way to describe our actual integration with Google Contacts, but there wasn’t anything we could do about this authorization screen.

We lost a lot of potential users thanks to this: people who had been burned in the past by unscrupulous app developers who would spam everyone in their address book. So, we concluded that this cool feature was really a liability.

The Solution:

We are abandoning integration with Google Contacts with our latest software update. Existing users are not affected, since they have already authorized Kerika to access their Google Contacts (and are, presumably, comfortable with that decision), but new users will no longer be asked whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage their Google Contacts”.

Instead, we are introducing our own auto-completion of names and email addresses based upon a friends of friends model: if you type in part of a user’s email, Kerika will help you match this against the names of that are part of your extended collaboration network:

People you already work with on projects.
People who work with the people who work with you.

We hope this proves to be a more comfortable fit for our users; do let us know what you think!

Breaking through the code review bottleneck

January 22, 2014TechnologyScrumuser

A month ago we wrote about how Kerika makes it really easy to spot bottlenecks in a development process – far easier, in our opinion – than relying upon burndown carts.

That blog post noted that the Kerika team itself had been struggling with code reviews as our major bottleneck. Well, we are finally starting to catch up: over the past two days we focused heavily on code reviews and just last night nearly 80 cards got moved to Done!

Usability testing is surprising cheap (revisiting Jakob Nielsen)

January 20, 2014Technology, UsabilityUsabilityKerika

Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen-Norman group, is an old hand at Web usability – a very old hand, indeed, and one whose popularity and influence has waxed and waned over the last two decades.

(Yes, that’s right: Mr. Nielsen has been doing Web usability for 2 decades!)

Kerika founder, Arun Kumar, had the good fortune of meeting Mr. Nielsen in the mid-90s, when he was just embarking upon his career as an independent consultant. The career choice seemed to have come from necessity: Mr. Nielsen has been working in the Advanced Technology Group at Sun Microsystems, and they had recently, with their usual prescience, decided to disband this group entirely leaving Mr. Nielsen unexpected unemployed.

(This was before Sun concluded there was money to be made by re-branding themselves as the “dot in dot com“. As with so many opportunities in their later years, Sun was late to arrive and late to depart that particular party.)

It must have seemed a treacherous time for Mr. Nielsen to embark upon a consulting career in Web usability, back in the mid-90s, when despite Mosaic/Netscape’s success a very large number of big companies still viewed the Internet as a passing fad. And Mr. Nielsen, from the very outset, opposed many of the faddish gimmickry that Web designers, particular Flash designers, indulged in: rotating globes on every page (“we are a global company”, see?) and sliding, flying menus that made for a schizophrenic user experience.

Despite the animus that Flash designers and their ilk have directed towards Mr. Nielsen over the past decade – an animus that is surely ironic given how Flash has been crumbling before HTML5 – his basic research and their accompanying articles have stood the test of time, and are well worth re-reading today.

Here’s one that directly matches our own experience:

Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

And here’s the graph that sums is up:

Diminishing returns in usability testing

How to get rid of an old Kerika account

January 9, 2014TechnologyAccount, KerikaKerika

If you want to get rid of an old Kerika account, the easiest way is to simply de-authorize it from your Google account.

First, some background: when you sign up as a Kerika user, we use Google to figure out who you are, and what your email address is. (And to get permission to put Kerika project files in your Google Drive).

This means that Kerika becomes an authorized app, as far as Google is concerned.

And, it also means that you can de-authorize Kerika any time you want, from your Google account itself. Without authorization, you can’t use your old Kerika account, and neither can anyone else (assuming no one stole your Google password!)

So, here’s how you can disable Kerika, by de-authorizing it from Google: first, go to your Google account’s security settings at https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions?hl=en

Here, you will all the third-party applications, including Kerika, that are currently authorized to use your Google credentials. Simply Revoke Access to Kerika, and you will disable your Kerika account:

Click here to revoke accesss for Kerika — Click here to revoke access for Kerika

Note: you need to make sure you are logged out of Kerika as well. If you leave yourself logged into Kerika on someone else’s computer, they will be able to continue to view your old projects, although they won’t be able to access any of the files that are stored in your Google Drive, or add any new files.

How to create a new Google ID

January 9, 2014TechnologyAccountuser

(Updated April 6, 2014 to reflect changes by Google)

If you are going to use Kerika for business, and don’t have a premium Google Apps account, make sure you create a new Google ID that maps to your existing (business) email ID.

For example, if you are someone@somecompany.com, you can create a new Google ID that is “someone@somecompany.com”: it works just like any other Google ID, and it doesn’t require you to switch to Gmail or anything like that.

First, sign out of your old Google account:

Then, click on the Sign In button at the top-right:

Before you create a new Google ID, you need to make sure you have completely signed out of your old Google ID. To do that, click on Sign in with a different account:

Click on Sign in with a different account

This step is scary-looking (intentionally?), but you need to Remove your account first. This doesn’t mean that you are actually closing or deleting your old Google account, it just means you are finally removing Google’s cookie from your browser.

Click here to make sure you are completely logged out

Clicking on Remove brings up this screen:

Now you are finally logged out of Google!

Now, you are ready to set up a new Google account. Click on the Create an account link:

Click on I prefer to use my current email address

Click here to use your existing email account

And, you are finally ready to create a new Google ID, that maps to an existing business email. This could be an email ID from anywhere: you can use a Yahoo email or a Hotmail ID, as well as any email ID from your employer.

Creating a new Google ID in this way doesn’t mean you are switching to Gmail!

What a CPU spike looks like

December 27, 2013Kerika, TechnologyPerformanceuser

We have been experiencing a CPU spike on one of our servers over the past week, thanks to a batch job that clearly needs some optimization.

The CPU spike happens at midnight, UTC (basically, Greenwich Mean Time), when the job was running, and it looks like this:

It’s pretty dramatic: our normal CPU utilization is very steady, at less than 30%, and the over a 10-minute period at midnight it shoots up to nearly 90%.

Well, that sucks. We have disabled the batch job and are going to take a closer look at the SQL involved to optimize the code.

Our apologies to users in Australia and New Zealand: this was hitting the middle of their morning use of Kerika and some folks experienced slowdowns as a result.

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