Category Archives: Usability

Posts related to product design, user experience and usability.

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.

Tablet support

Kerika, Usability,

We have added tablet support for iOS and Android devices, as you can see:

The tablet experience is like that of the desktop, not the phone.

For the phone app we had to redesign a lot of the user interface to accommodate the limited screen space, but with most tablets today there is enough screen resolution to support the more extensive desktop experience.

Easier to preview documents on mobile devices

Kerika, Usability,

We have made it easy for you to preview documents that are attached to cards or whiteboards, regardless of how you sign up for Kerika.

Screenshot showing a preview of an attached document on an iPhone
Previewing docs on an iPhone

You could have signed up using a Google ID, a Box ID, or just your email: it doesn’t matter how you signed up, nor how other members of your team signed up.

Previewing documents just became really easy.

A recent update to our mobile App

Kerika, Usability

When you click on a link to a Kerika board or card in an email, that link will now automatically open in the Kerika Mobile App instead of opening in a browser tab.

This makes it a lot easier to respond to emails sent when your team members do chat on boards that concerns you: you can either do a quick reply as email itself, or, if you need more context, click on the link to open the card inside the Kerika app and see all it’s details before deciding upon your reply.

Actions buttons added to cards in mobile app

Usability

We have added action buttons for the two most common actions that users perform with cards, especially when they are viewing them using one of the mobile views: Move to Done and Move to Trash:

Screenshot of mobile app showing buttons

We have also added Done and Trash to the set of Status Values you can assign a card when viewing it’s details, on desktop and mobile:

Screenshot of card details on desktop

Screenshot of card details on mobile

You can now choose your background colors

Kerika, Usability,

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 dialog on desktop
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:

Choosing color preferences
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!