Category Archives: Usability

Posts related to product design, user experience and usability.

Bug, fixed: handling filenames with Cyrillic characters

Usability,

A Russian user kindly alerted us to a bug that we have now fixed: filenames that used Cyrillic characters were not getting uploaded correctly, because of an encoding problem.

The problem had to do with Kerika not using a sufficiently large character set, which resulted in some languages not being supported properly.

We have fixed that by moving away from the UTF8 character encoding to UTF8MB4, which is an encoding format used by MySQL databases.

UTF8 uses a maximum of 3 bytes per character, which limits the range of languages that can be supported.  UTF8MB4, however, uses a maximum of 4 bytes per character which considerably extends the range of possible characters.

Distinguishing between “Rescheduled to” and “Scheduled”

Usability,

As we were “eating our own dogfood” with the new Planning Views feature, we increasingly found a need to distinguish between cards that had been scheduled for the first time, and those that were being rescheduled because they didn’t meet their original due dates.

This was probably a useful distinction for us to have made even before now, but the new Planning Views made it really important to tell which cards were slipping and which weren’t, and anyway, that’s the whole point of “dogfooding”: we use what we build, extensively, before we give it to our users, and that’s how we make great software 🙂

So here’s a simple enhancement that we think will help all teams: if a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board is rescheduled, i.e. given a new due date, the card will flag that like this:

Rescheduled Due Date
Rescheduled Due Date

As soon as you click on the card, the orange highlight gets turned off, and the due date is shown like any other date:

Regular Due Date
Regular Due Date

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.

Filtering by Status: a new feature

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

Here’s another way that Kerika makes it easy to manage really large Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can use the new Filter dialog to show just those cards that are flagged as having a particular status — for example, you could view just the Critical items, or just the Needs Rework items:

Kerika has several  flags you can use to identify the state of the cards on your board:

Card status
Card status
  • Ready to Pull: this means the card is ready to be picked by someone within the team, in accordance with the project’s workflow.
  • In Progress: this signals the card is being actively worked on by someone; it helps call out which cards are active, among several that may be assigned to the same person.
  • Needs Rework: this calls out the need for a “do-over” of some part of the work — e.g. if a design fails review, or work was not done as expected on a particular card.
  • On Hold: this indicates that the person assigned to that card has put it aside temporarily, usually because the person got diverted by some other work (which presumably is now marked as “In Progress”).
  • Is Blocked: not good; it means that the person who has been assigned that work is not able to progress as they would like to, due to forces beyond their control. Time for the Project Leaders to intervene!
  • Critical: hopefully this gets used sparingly…

Use Kerika’s new Filter by Status capability for your project status review meetings: it’s easy to see which cards are going well, and which ones need help.

Colors+Tags: a much better way to organize large boards

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

We have had both tags and color coding of cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards for a very long time, but, unfortunately, these operated independently of each other.

There’s no good reason for them to have been separate aspects of working with cards other than simple history: we added color coding many months after we added tags.

Originally we expected color coding to be used in a limited way only: to highlight a few cards on a crowded board that needed special attention.

We had a limited set of 7 light pastels that were chosen to be “color-safe”, i.e. appropriate for use by color-blind people.

Over time, however, we found that people were using color coding a lot more than we had anticipated, and that in fact they were using colors as an alternative to regular tags.

And that was true for the Kerika team as well: we have a “bug” tag that we use to track all work related to defects, but some of us also like to use the red color to highlight cards related to bugs.

And while we could readily agree on the symbolic meaning of a few colors, e.g. Red as indicating something critical or broken, we couldn’t agree on the names or meanings of all the colors.

So, this obviously wasn’t a sustainable path for us: if colors and labels were simply alternative ways of managing your view of a large board, and for collating work across multiple boards, then clearly colors and tags needed to come together as a single concept.

And that’s what we have done with our latest release: colors and tags are now the same thing — all colors have names, all tags can have colors.

Here’s what your Kerika boards will look like, with the new way of showing tags:

New tags styling
New tags styling

A couple of points to note:

  • All your old tags are preserved with this change, so you don’t have to go back and fiddle with any of your old boards.
  • We will show more than one tag on a card at a time; this will make it easier to visually scan a large board.

The dialog for managing your board’s tags has also been updated, to reflect the new merger of tags and colors:

Tags dialog
Tags dialog

When you add a new tag, you have to use a different label from the ones you are currently using: as before, duplicate tags are not allowed.

And the same goes for colors: when you add a new tag, you can’t use a color that is already associated with a label, which means tags have unique colors.

One unique benefit we have added, along with this merger of tags and colors, is the ability to merge tags together.

Let’s say you had been using a tag called “bug” (if you are working on a software project). Some of your colleagues have been using a different tag called “defect”.

You decide that these two tags really reflect the same underlying concept — they are both being used to highlight problems with your software project — so it makes sense to merge these two tags together.

There used to be no easy way of doing this in the past, but now there is:

  • You can merge tags by renaming one of them, e.g. renaming “bug” to “defect” will cause the system the ask if you want to merge “bug” and “defect” together to be same tag.

 

  • You can also merge tags by recoloring on of them, e.g. by changing the color of the “bug” tag to be the same color as the “defect” tag will cause the system to ask if you want to merge these two tags.

 

We hope you like these changes 🙂

Redesigning the Whiteboard Toolbar

Usability,

We did an update to the toolbar shown on Whiteboards (and canvases attached to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards), and while that modernized the look of the toolbar — and removed some usability problems with the old design — in retrospect it didn’t do a good enough job of simplifying the interface 🙁

Current Canvas Toolbar
Current Canvas Toolbar

The problem with this design was that it mixed together two different functions:

  • Providing drawing function, e.g. drawing a rectangle on the canvas.
  • Providing context-specific functions, e.g. linking an image to an external URL.

To improve this design, we are reverting to a very old style: having the drawing buttons appear on the left side of the Kerika canvas:

New Canvas Toolbar
New Canvas Toolbar

Now, all the functions that put content on the canvas: shapes, lines, files, Web content, etc. are shown on the left edge of the canvas, and the context-specific items — e.g. changing the color of a selected shape on the canvas — are shown on the top.

Using a left-edge toolbar goes back to the very first version of Kerika, although back then we had rather embarrassing styling 🙂

Using Filters with your Task Boards and Scrum Boards

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

A new tutorial video that shows you how Kerika’s powerful Filter feature lets you customize your view of any Task Board or Scrum Board: just see those cards that are assigned to you, or create more custom views of a board by selecting cards based upon their status, tags, or the people assigned to work on them.

You can even hide entire columns on the board if you like 🙂