User adoption of our mobile apps for Android and iOS has been moving along nicely; so far we have heard only positive feedback but of course please let us know what we could do better.
A small pocket of users are having trouble: those who are using Kerika with Box and have 2FA (two-factor authentication enabled). There is a bug with Box’s mobile API that we are still waiting for them to finish (it’s been a couple of weeks now). Hopefully that will get sorted out soon.
The Kerika Elite is a program we have set up to improve our product strategy and gather feedback from a select group of our most experienced and influential users.
There are two main elements to this program:
Kerika Elite users have contributed greatly to our mobile development efforts over the past year, and we look forward to their advice and suggestions for our future initiatives as well.
Can you be one of them? Sure. Anyone can nominate another user to be part of the Kerika Elite, although the final decision is ours to make.
Kerika Elite users are not compensated in any way; they simply enjoy being in the kitchen with the Kerika Team when we cook up delicious new dishes!
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:
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:
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!
A long (45 minutes) video of the presentation that Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, made at the Lean Transformation Conference last October, anticipating the need for accommodating remote and virtual teams.
We are trying to make sure all inbound communications from our users comes to the same place: support@kerika.com.
(Previously we were also using info@kerika.com but that email is too generic to ensure we reply as fast as possible.)
Thanks.
We have improved the invoices generated by Kerika, for both online and offline billing, to include a full listing of the Account Team to make it easier for the finance/purchasing departments of our customers to track changes made to Board Teams and the Account Team.
Here’s an example:
For each person who is currently part of the Account Team, Kerika will list their name, email, role and Invited On and Joined Team dates.
Invited On is the date on which someone was added to a Board Team or the Account Team; this is also the date on which one of the Account’s free subscriptions is used up — or the Account Owner is prompted to purchase an additional subscription, if no free subscriptions remain for that Account.
Joined On is the date on which the invitation was actually accepted by the new team member, which, hopefully, is really close to the Invited Team. (Otherwise the Account is wasting days on a used subscription.)
Role is the highest role a person occupies within an Account, across all the boards where the user is part of the team. If a user is a Team Member on some boards and a Visitor on others, that person’s role will be listed as Team Member.
As Kerika gets adopted by large organizations, we were seeing a disconnect between the active users who were making decisions about adding or removing people from their teams, and the finance/purchasing departments within the same organizations who were being asked to approve invoices. This change fixes that disconnect.
We have been lax in updating this blog, sorry, but not lax at all in working on improving Kerika, especially for mobile browser users. We are also getting close to releasing our mobile app, which will contain the same functionality as you get today when you access Kerika on a phone, but it will be packaged as a traditional-looking app for folks that want an icon on their desktop.
Here’s a short list of things that have been improved and added in the past few months:
There’s more of the desktop functionality now available on phones as well, including:
Our development team in India is under a national lock-down due to Covid-19, and we had been worried about a loss of productivity.
After a week of lock-down we have been checking with each person, and it turns out there was no cause for worry, especially from those who had the foresight to grab an extra monitor before leaving their office.
In fact, we expect that our team will ask for work-from-home as a regular work model even after the virus is gone.
Kerika is designed for, and built by remote teams!
Kerika has been a sponsor of the Lean Transformation Conference every year, since the very first conference. In addition to contributing sponsor fees, our founder and CEO, Arun Kumar, has given a presentation each year, on different topics related to the conference.
At the last conference (in October 2019), Arun gave a talk on Virtual Teams: what’s different about a virtual team vs. a traditional collocated team, and how a virtual team can be very successful if it adopts the right processes and tools. A total of 117 people attended, and 55% of them rated the presentation as “Very Useful” or “Extremely Useful”.
Kerika also paid for a professional videographer to film the presentation so it could be made available online for others.
The topic of Virtual Teams is particularly important today because the Covid-19 virus has hit the state of Washington hardest (in the US), and everyone, including the government employees are scrambling to adjust to telework.
You might think that the video would be particularly helpful to the state right now, since it covered precisely those topics that the state (and much of the world) is grappling with today:
Imagine our surprise then to receive, out of the blue, this takedown notice:
So the video is gone. A small business tried to help the state of Washington, but won’t try again.