Category Archives: Usability

Posts related to product design, user experience and usability.

What’s New and Updated: a new Kerika View

November 28, 2018Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, UsabilityKanban, Kerika, Notifications, Scrum, Tags, Task Board, Task Management, Teams, Trash, Views, WorkflowKerika

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.

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:

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:

(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:

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.

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 🙂

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.

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