Category Archives: Usability

Posts related to product design, user experience and usability.

Two ways of referencing URLs in Kerika

Technology, Usability

When you include a URL in a task’s details tab or chat, Kerika will look up the URL and then display the title of the page.  This is really useful because the URL may be very long and generally unintelligible, and people find the name of the site to be more useful.

Here’s an example, where the URL for the New York Times website is included in a chat message:

After this chat is sent, Kerika will look up the URL and then use the site’s name when the chat is displayed in Kerika, like this:

This is useful most of the time. The original URL, from the Wall Street Journal was long and contained many characters as a suffix  that most people would not find helpful.

But sometimes you want the URL itself to be clearly visible, and that’s possible in Kerika if you use the special escape character called the tilde “`” which appears on the top-left corner of English keyboards.

Here’s how you would use the tilde to “escape” the URL you are referencing:

And this is how it would look in the chat stream:

Because you used the tilde character to bracket the URL, Kerika doesn’t try to show the name; instead it shows the URL exactly as it is.

Another useful improvement from Kerika 🙂

Kerika has a Template for Creating a Customer Journey Map

Best Practices, Usability, , ,
Template for Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points.
To understand this concept better, start with this great article from the Nielsen Norman Group: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/
We have distilled this down to a Kanban board with all the required steps that can be set up in just seconds using our free template.
How to use this template:
  1. Click on the USE TEMPLATE button and create your own board.
  2. Next, invite your coworkers to join this board. There’s a lot to get done, so hopefully you are not on your own!
    1. If you have stakeholders who need to know what’s going on, add them to this board as Visitors, so they will have a real-time view of progress without messing up anyone’s work.
  3. When you team has joined you, open the tasks one by one, starting at the top of the To Do column.
    1. Assign the task to yourself, or one of your team members. (A task can be assigned to more than one person.)
    2. Mark it as IN PROGRESS so everyone knows the task is underway.
  4. As each task gets worked on, people can contribute their ideas and documents right on the task card itself, so nothing gets lost.
  5. When the task gets completed, mark it as DONE.

How to import boards from Trello

Kerika, Technology, Usability,

We have added an exciting new feature: if you were previously using Trello, you can import that data, completely, into Kerika!

We have been testing this as a convenience feature and based upon positive feedback we have expanded this for everyone.

New users will be offered this as an option when they set up their Kerika accounts:

Screenshot showing how new Kerika users can import boards from Trello
How new Kerika users can import boards from Trello

All users will have this option whenever they want to create a new Kerika board:

Screenshot showing how all users can import from Trello when creating a new Kerika board
All users can import from Trello when creating a new Kerika board

We built this feature because we have heard from many people switched over from Trello and really liked Kerika’s user experience, features, and support. In the past they had to manually recreate their work inside Trello; now that’s all automated!

Everything is handled nicely: your Trello cards, lists, people, task details, etc. come over. Once you are done, a single click can then send out invitations to all your old Trello colleagues to join you in Kerika.

Enjoy.

 

How to make sure someone sees your Chat

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

With our latest update we have made it easy for you to ensure that someone on a board team always sees your chat message, even if they are not assigned to that card.

The old rule was that everyone who is currently assigned to a card would get new chat pushed to them as emails.  Now, you can make sure someone gets that email notification right away, even if they aren’t assigned to a particular card:

Screenshot showing examples of directed chat
Directed chat

Using this feature is simple: just type the letter “@” anywhere in your chat message and Kerika offers all the matching suggestions:

Screenshot showing example of sending new chat
Sending new chat

“@All” lets you push your chat to every Board Admin and Team Member — something you should do only rarely to avoid annoying people!

Try this feature and let us know if we can improve it.

Some improvements for Task Auto-Numbering

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

We got feedback from some users after our last big release on how we could improve the user experience for folks who like to use the auto-numbering feature for Task Boards, and we have made these changes:

When you open a task, it’s number is shown (but can’t, of course, be edited)

Screenshot showing the Task Details dialog with numbering turned on
Editing a Numbered Task

You can now search for a numbered task simply by typing “#number” in the Search box

Screenshot showing how search by task number works
Search by Number

A more space-efficient layout for Task Boards

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

We have redesigned the Task/Card details dialog to provide a more space-efficient layout, so you can see more of what you need without having to scroll:

Screenshot showing the Task Details dialog
Task Details

What used to be vertical tabs for Details, Chat, etc., is now a compact horizontal tab; this frees up a lot of space to see the details of the tags.

The other big change we made is to make the Priority setting separate from other Tags:

Screenshot highlighting position of Task Priority field
Task Priority flag

Clicking on the star will bring up your task priority options:

Screenshot showing possible values for Task Priority
Task Priority

Cards are tasks, so we are renaming cards as Tasks

Usability,

If you have a engineering background, you will be comfortable calling the items that show up on Task Boards as “cards” — a term that originated with Kanban production lines in Japan, and then found its way to Scrum boards everywhere.

But for everyone else, “card” is a somewhat obscure, even baffling term, and we would often get asked a fundamental question: “what should I put on a card?

To make this clearer to folks, we are renaming cards as Tasks, because that’s what a Task/Card is: something your team needs to get done.

This is really a cosmetic change: wherever you had previously seen the word “card” you will now see either “task” or the more generic “item”.  The ADD A CARD button, for example, is now ADD NEW TASK:

And what had previously been called “tasks within cards” (or sub-tasks), is now more simply called a Checklist:

Screenshot showing a Card's Checklist
Card Checklist

Again, this is a change in terminology, not a change in functionality, but we hope it will make Kerika easier for the wide variety of users we have across the world, ranging from companies and governments all the way down to schoolkids.

Moving entire columns of tasks (cards)

Kanban & Lean, Usability,

We have added a new function to let Board Admins and Team Members move an entire column of tasks (cards) with a single action, within a single board or across multiple boards in the same account.

The function can be accessed by from the  menu that appears as a pop-up when you click on the dots on the top of each column, as well as when you use the right-click mouse action on any cards:

Screenshot showing the Task Options menu
Move entire column

If you choose the Move to another column action, a pop-up dialog appears that lets you choose the column you want to move these cards to:

Screenshot showing the Move to Another Column dialog
Move to another column

If you choose the Move to another board action, a new dialog appears that lets you choose the board where you want these tasks to go to:

Screenshot showing moving cards from one board to another
Move to another board

After selecting a destination board, you can then pick the exact location of the column you are moving, relative to the columns that are already on that board.

And, as you can see, from the screenshot, you are also able to move columns from boards in one account to another account where you are also an Account Member.