A new feature that we recently introduced will let you choose a background color: one for the desktop app, and one for the mobile app. (Oops, did we just talk about the mobile app?)
To select a color: click on your user profile photo, which appears on the top-right of Kerika:
User Preferences
Select My Preferences for this Account from this dialog, and you will land on a revamped Preferences page that now includes options for selecting a background color:
Color Preferences
We are offering a range of light and dark backgrounds; in our own testing we found that the darker backgrounds look better on the desktop, while the lighter backgrounds look better on phones. But, of course, that’s just our opinion — try this out and select what you like best!
We have been lax in updating this blog, sorry, but not lax at all in working on improving Kerika, especially for mobile browser users. We are also getting close to releasing our mobile app, which will contain the same functionality as you get today when you access Kerika on a phone, but it will be packaged as a traditional-looking app for folks that want an icon on their desktop.
Here’s a short list of things that have been improved and added in the past few months:
For mobile browsers
There’s more of the desktop functionality now available on phones as well, including:
Managing the columns on a board: adding new columns and changing existing columns so you can customize the workflow of each board.
Drag-and-drop to reorganize items within lists: the order of columns, the order of tasks and attachments within a card, etc.
The Home Page (which we will be calling the Explorer, in anticipation of other anchor pages that we will roll out soon) has more complete abilities to manage your boards, templates, archive and trash, including favoriting items.
The Contact Us (to get help) feature has been implemented.
The Manage Profile feature has been implemented, including changing your name, photo and password.
The My Preferences feature has been implemented, and redesigned for both the desktop and mobile to make this easier to use.
We have made performance improvements across the board, although we continue to push the boundary on this. (One of our own boards regularly has over 700 cards so we are our toughest users and testers.)
A bunch of styling tweaks to help improve usability and readability, and there’s always going to be more coming in the future.
For desktop users
A bug that caused Views to not be properly updated for some users has been fixed.
When you switch from your current board to another open board and then return to the first board, Kerika will remember the scroll position so you can pick up where you left off without any delay.
For both mobile and desktop
The Preferences section has been reorganized to make it easier to use.
We have made some tweaks to make it easier to sign up, change passwords, etc. (And there’s more coming on this front.)
Users who signed up after getting an invitation from someone else will start off just having access to the boards and accounts they were invited to; now they can create their own account as well if they want to use Kerika for private work using the same email address.
Fixed some issues with our billing system that caused us to be underpaid in a few instances. We are going to do a big overhaul of our billing system later this year (hopefully) to make it easier for both Kerika and our customers.
We just updated Kerika today, and along with the usual bug fixes and other behind-the-scenes stuff we have made an improvement to the way Views are shown on your Home Page:
Improved Views in Kerika
Some of our users have dozens of boards in active use at the same time, with large (and sometimes overlapping) teams, and as a result their Views counts are nearly always high.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the Home page now shows two counts for each View:
The total number of items that match for that View, and
The number of items that match that are assigned to you.
This makes it easier to see if you need to go back to a View to catch up on something that’s directly related to you, i.e. is assigned to you.
Views are unique to Kerika: no other work management system provides such an easy way to see what matters, across all the boards you are working on.
These Views make it easy for organizations to really scale up their use of Kerika across multiple projects and many ongoing projects at the same time.
We have now added a very useful new View: What’s New and Updated. As you might guess from the name, this View lets you catch up on everything that’s new and changed, across all the boards you are working on — as a Board Admin, Team Member or Visitor.
What’s New and Updated (click for a larger image)
This View can work very effectively as a Dashboard for managers who need to keep track of many different boards, all working at the same time: instead of constantly revisiting each board one-by-one, this View is a simple, comprehensive way to see everything that’s changing across all your boards.
The updates are shown in Kerika’s unique “heads-up” notification style: the blue New tags highlight cards that have been newly added to your boards (that you haven’t opened yet), and the orange highlights show you precisely what’s changed on your old cards.
The new and changed cards are sorted into columns, with each column containing all the new and changed items within a particular board. The newest changes appear at the top of a column, and if a board has nothing new to report, the corresponding column is not shown (so your View doesn’t get cluttered up.)
(Cards that are moved to the Done or Trash columns on a board are not included in the View, to help avoid getting the View cluttered.)
As with all Views, it’s easy to operate on all the cards within a column, by selecting the Column Actions button that appears on the top of each column:
View options
The Mark All Cards As Read action is useful if you want to ignore everything that’s going on in a particular board, e.g. when you have just returned from a status meeting where you got fully briefed on what’s happening on a particular board.
Another way to temporarily ignore individual boards is to Hide Column: this collapses the column from the View, and let’s you focus more intently on the handful of boards you care most about.
Selecting a card in this View lets you open the card within the View itself, or to open it on the board where the card actually sits:
View card
(Sometimes it’s easy to deal with cards just by themselves; sometimes the View Board action is more helpful, if you want to be sure you understand the full context in which a card changed.)
Using your mouse’s right-click action will also bring up a bunch of useful actions for that card:
Mouse actions
In addition to all the other actions you can perform on cards, you also have the option to get the URL (address) of card using the Get Link action. Every cards, every canvas and every board in Kerika has a unique address, and using these URLs anywhere on a board, e.g. in the board’s details or chat, will automatically set up a link between the two cards.
When you mark a card as “read” on this View, it remains on the View until you click on the Refresh button (shown at the top-right corner of the View).
And, as with all Views in Kerika, the What’s New and Updated View includes the “For Me” toggle button on the top-right corner: clicking this will quickly filter the View to show you just those items that are personally assigned to you.
For Me toggle (click for larger image)
This feature is available to all our users, just like every other feature in Kerika: it doesn’t matter whether you are still in your 30-day free trial, you are working on the free Individual Plan, or are benefiting from Kerika’s free Academic and Nonprofits Accounts. Everyone always get the same Kerika goodies 🙂
We have improved our Views feature to include a simple toggle that lets you filter the entire View to show just those items that are assigned to you.
This new toggle appears on the top-right corner of the View, and we have added a Tip to help you understand the function:
What Needs Attention without filtering
Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:
What’s Due with filtering
All the other items are hidden from the View, and a simple count at the bottom of each column shows you how many items are assigned to others. In the example shown above, 1 item is assigned to someone else, and is due today.
It’s a simple, fast feature that we think shows the best of Kerika’s design approach 🙂
This feature has been added to all of our Views that need this:
It’s hard for us to get the balance right between making sure our users don’t miss out on important project updates, while avoiding the impression that Kerika is “too chatty”.
We are changing out default preferences settings — this will affect new users only, not existing users — to have most notifications emails turned OFF by default:
Notification defaults
One reason for this change is that our Views feature does a good job of providing an overview of important updates across boards — and we are going to make it even better in the near future — so for new users in particular, we don’t want to give the impression that Kerika will increase their incoming emails, rather than actually streamline their existing communications.
For some time now we have offered the ability for you to hide entire columns on a Task Board or Scrum Board; we are now extending that to Views as well:
Hidden column in Views
In the example shown above, several columns are hidden in this What Needs Attention view, and Kerika shows a count of how many items are hidden in each column.
This feature is available through the Column Actions button that’s at the top of each column:
Hide column option for Views
This can help you focus in on specific work items that need more attention than others.
We have made a small usability tweak/improvement to handle the (rare!) situation where you are part of someone’s Account, but for some reason the Account Owner is no longer sharing any boards with you.
To make this clearer, we are now showing a helpful message:
We noticed a number of folks were tripping over the process of entering their Billing Info (from the Manage Users page), which was embarrassing…
We have made some minor tweaks that we think will fix any potential confusion:
If you miss a required field — and remember: every field is required except for additional Billing Contacts — the system does a better job of getting you to pause and fix the mistake.
The process of selecting a Country and State/Province has been made easier. If you select the USA or Canada as your country, the State/Province field becomes a drop-down list since we know which states and provinces to present as choices in each case. If your country is something else, this field becomes a free text field to let you type in anything you want.
We recently got hit by spammers signing up as Kerika users, using fake emails from domains like mailinator.com, which seems to exist principally to help people do bad things on the Internet.
After signing up, these spammers (who seemed to be based in the Philippines) would invite hundreds of people with accounts on Tencent’s qq.com service in China. This would result in invitations being sent to these qq.com people to join the spammers on their Kerika boards.
To avoid a repeat of this problem, we are using Google’s reCAPTCHA in “silent” mode, on our signup and login pages — for people who sign up directly with Kerika using their email addresses.
This doesn’t affect the majority of our users, since most people sign up using their Google or Box accounts. And because the reCAPTCHA works silently, it shows up only when Google has reason to doubt that the person at the keyboard isn’t human.
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