Category Archives: Usability

Posts related to product design, user experience and usability.

Our Views feature just got even better

October 30, 2018Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, UsabilityKanban, Scrum, Task Board, Usability, Views, WorkflowKerika

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:

Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:

What's Due with filtering — 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:

What’s Due
What Needs Attention
What Got Done

What's Due without filtering — What’s Due without filtering

Making Kerika less chatty for new users

October 11, 2018UsabilityNotifications, Preferences, UsabilityKerika

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:

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.

You can now hide columns in your Views as well

October 3, 2018Agile & Scrum, UsabilityKanban, Scrum, Task Board, Usability, Views, WorkflowKerika

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:

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:

This can help you focus in on specific work items that need more attention than others.

Usability tweak: when someone’s Account is no longer sharing boards with you

October 2, 2018Team Collaboration, UsabilityAccount, TeamsKerika

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:

Some usability improvements to the Billing Info screen

September 28, 2018UsabilityAccount, UsabilityKerika

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 are adding ReCAPTCHA to our signup and login pages

July 12, 2018Kerika, UsabilityDirect Sign Up, SecurityKerika

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.

Sort by Priority: a new feature

June 1, 2018Agile & Scrum, Kerika, UsabilityKanban, Scrum, Task Board, UsabilityKerika

We are adding a new feature for cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards: in addition to sorting by date, person, status, and alphabetic order, you can sort by priority as well:

A simpler menu for cards and columns on your Task Boards and Scrum Boards

May 25, 2018Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, UsabilityKanban, Scrum, Task Board, UsabilityKerika

We used to have separate button, and associated menus, for actions related to cards and for actions related to columns:

This reflected the history of the Kerika product: we first designed and built the card actions, and much later added the column actions.

In retrospect, however, we concluded that separating these into two separate menus was not a good idea: it was confusing for our users to remember which menu supported which action. (Even the Kerika team, which uses Kerika for everything that the company does, was having trouble remembering the differences between the two buttons and menus.)

We have fixed that usability problem with our latest release: a single button is shown, and the popup menu that appears includes both card actions and column actions:

Clicking on the Sort and Move actions brings up all the sorting and moving options you have; the Sort menu now has a much richer set of actions:

We have also done some small tweaks to the sorting action: Sort by Status now puts the On Hold cards at the bottom of the column, below all the ones flagged as Normal.

Changes to how you access different Accounts in Kerika

May 16, 2018Kerika, UsabilityAccount, Preferences, TeamsKerika

With our latest update, launched over the weekend, we have made some significant changes to how users access multiple Kerika accounts.

The motivation for all this is simple: our old billing mechanism was manual and error-prone. It was difficult to track which accounts had paid for subscriptions and to ensure that subscriptions were renewed in a timely manner.

So we are moving to an completely automated system that will allow our customers to manage their subscriptions more easily, make online or offline purchases, and manage their account teams.

We are about halfway there: we have done the changes to the account management piece, and have some more work before the billing system is ready.

One consequence of this is the way you view your Home Page has changed: the Home will now always show the boards and templates that related to a single account, rather than across multiple accounts.

(Previously there were three buckets: Favorites, Owned by Me, and Shared With Me.)

Switching between all your open boards, and all your accounts, has been consolidated into a single Account Switcher function that appears on the top-left corner of the Kerika app, where the old Board Switcher used to be:

Clicking on the Account Switcher will let you switch between boards, and between accounts:

Calendar syncing and Preferences are now applied on an account level, so if you are working in multiple accounts, you can choose to have different preferences for each account.

You can access your Calendar and Preferences settings by clicking on your face on the upper-right corner of the Kerika app:

With this change, it becomes more important for organizations to consolidate ownership of all their boards within a single account. You can do this yourself, by selecting boards from your Home Page and using the Move to Another Account function:

You can also let us do this for you: just contact us at support@kerika.com, and let us know which accounts you would like to consolidate and we can do all the work.

Showing the names of documents when they are referenced inside Kerika

March 22, 2018UsabilityDirect Sign Up, Document Management, WhiteboardKerika

We added a feature recently (or did we actually a bug?) for our direct login users: when you reference a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, canvas or board, from another place in Kerika — e.g. another card’s details or chat — we now show the file’s name instead of just the URL.

This makes it easier to cross-reference file attachments from within different Kerika cards or boards, where different work items or conversations refer to the same shared file.

Here’s an example:

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