For experienced users who don’t need as much help in starting new boards, we are providing a faster mechanism that skips some steps that are currently shown to new users.
You can access this faster mechanism by clicking on the Skip Suggestions link in the current Start New Board dialog:
Skipping Suggestions
Once you click on Skip Suggestions, Kerika will recognize you as an experienced user who prefers a path like this:
Starting a New Board
Once you pick the kind of new board you want — Task Board, Scrum Board, or Whiteboard — you can immediately name your new board:
Starting a new Task Board
Kerika will assume your new board will use the same template that you last used, but if you like you can change to a different template by clicking on the Change Settings link:
Selecting a Template
This should save our experienced users a few clicks when they want to start a new board…
We have updated the My Profile page (you can access yours at https://kerika.com/my-profile) to be consistent with our new look-and-feel:
My Profile
Updating your photo is easy: you can either upload something from your laptop, or get something that’s already online, e.g. your LinkedIn profile photo:
Change Photo
If you are a Kerika+Google or Kerika+Box user, it will look a little different, since we never see your Google or Box password (and hence are in no position to help you change it), and we also rely upon Google/Box to give us your name and photo:
One of our users pointed out that Kerika wasn’t allowing people to be invited if their email addresses were from one of the newer top-level domains that are being used: e.g. “.build”.
We have fixed that. The problem was the client software had some validation rules, written a long time ago, that checked for three characters to appear after the “.” in the end of an email address.
That’s obviously not a good idea anymore, now that there are dozens of top-level domains…
We have restyled your Preferences page, to be more in line with the new design of Kerika that we released a couple of months ago. It now looks like this:
Board Preferences
We are using the familiar “card container” style for showing different categories of preferences, like WIP limits, along with the left-side tabs that are similar to those you find on the Home page.
The Boards tab lets you set the following preferences:
The privacy of new boards you create: you can make them accessible to anyone with a link; to just people who are part of your Account Team; or to only those people you invite to the board as Board Admins, Team Members or Visitors.
Whether to use Work-In-Progress (WIP Limits) on new Task Boards or Scrum Boards that you create.
Whether to have your documents converted to the Google Docs format, if you are using Kerika+Google, or whether you want to retain them in their original format e.g. Microsoft Office. (This preference isn’t shown to Kerika+Box users, or those users who signed up directly.)
Notification Preferences
In the Notifications tab you can decide how much you want to hear from Kerika when stuff happens (that concerns you).
If you are assigned a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, and someone does chat on that card, Kerika will always push that to you as an email: we assume that since you are responsible for a card, you need to know sooner rather than later when someone has a comment or question about that work item.
If you are a Board Admin, however, you can decide how many notifications you want when stuff happens on boards that you are responsible for.
For example, you could be notified if someone adds a new card on a board: this usually means that there is new/more work to be done by your team, so you might want to quickly check whether it is important — or whether it is even relevant for that particular board.
And, as a Board Admin, you might want to know whenever someone moves a card to Done. This is usually a welcome notification: people like to hear that stuff is getting done, but if a team/board gets a lot of stuff done every day these emails can be a nuisance and you might want to turn off this preference.
And, depending upon how involved you want to be with each card and each Team Member, you can get notified whenever a card is reassigned from one person to another. Some Board Admins like to be very much in control over who is doing what, so if a Team Member takes the initiative to reassign work to another Team Member the Board Admin may want to know right away. Other Board Admins take a more relaxed, hands-off approach and let the team handle its own work allocation.
Finally, you can choose to get a 6AM email summary of everything that is overdue, due this week, and due next week: for all cards assigned to you personally, as well as a all cards on boards where you are one of the Board Admins. You have the additional option of getting this list summarized by date, or by board — or both.
Canvas Preferences
The Canvas Preferences let you determine how lines, shapes and text look like, by default, when you use Whiteboards.
One useful preference in this tab is to have items snap to grids: this helps you lay out process diagrams more neatly.
While fast access to actions is generally a good thing in user interfaces, we think there are some circumstances where it might be a good idea to deliberately slow down users, if they are likely to rush into making a mistake.
One such tweak we have introduced is to collapse the Move and Sort options for arranging cards within a column into sub-menus:
Collapsed Sort menu
When clicked, the Sort cards option expands to show the different sorts that are available:
Expanded Sort menu
Effectively, this use of a sub-menu within a an already short menu is a deliberate decision on our part to slow you down from rushing into a sorting action.
An inadvertent sort can cause some havoc if the team had previously spent many hours, or even days, carefully grooming the cards on a column (like the Backlog, for example) to arrange them in a precise order.
One rushed sort could wreck all that, so perhaps access to Sort needs to be a little harder?
We have done something similar for the Move actions that are available on cards:
Collapsed Move menuExpanded Move menu
What do you think? Smart move on our part, or dumb? Let us know.
We have restyled the Color Picker that’s used on Whiteboards and a few other places inside Kerika to be more finger-friendly: the old design was very cramped and not usable on touchscreens.
Color Picker
With this new design, each color swatch is large enough to meet design guidelines for touch devices.
We made some user interface tweaks to make sure people are aware of a really great feature in Kerika that’s existed for a while, but was buried in a Preferences screen that not everyone paid attention to: you can have your Kerika Due Dates automatically show up on your Google, Microsoft or Apple Calendar.
Well, that’s buried no more: we have added a Calendar Synch button in a more prominent place on the top-right of the Kerika app:
Calendar button
Clicking on this button will let you choose the type of calendar you want to synch with:
Calendar choices
(Hint: you can have your Kerika Due Dates synch with more than one calendar, if you like.)
Pick your favorite calendar type, and you will see detailed instructions on how to set up syncing of your Kerika Due Dates. Here’s an example of syncing with Apple Calendars:
Calendar instructions
The URL is personal, and should be kept confidential. (That’s why we aren’t showing it in the illustration above.)
The URL is long and random so it will be impossible for others to guess, but it’s not a good idea to share it with others unless you really want them to know all your Kerika Due Dates, e.g. if you have an assistant or delegate that helps manage your daily schedule.
We have done a bunch of small bug fixes and usability tweaks to the Tasks feature we introduced a few weeks ago:
When a user’s last Task within a card is marked as Done, the user’s name is removed from the list of people shown as being assigned to that card. (Previously you had to do this cleanup manually.)
When a Task that was previously marked as Done is changed to be “undone” (open/remaining), the user who had previously been assigned to that Task is added back to the list of people shown assigned to the card.
Bug fix: If someone is assigned to a Task, and this person had previously completed a Done Task, this user wasn’t getting added automatically to the list of people shown on the card. This has been fixed.
If you have signed up directly with Kerika, we use the Box Platform to store your files for you — Box is a secure, reliable cloud service and we have been a partner with them for several years.
But we do all this for you: efficiently, quietly and behind the scenes.
Which means you may never notice (and, really, you shouldn’t have to…)
However, we found that some users automatically block third-party cookies (this is a browser setting available in all types of browsers).
This was causing problems for the preview function for these users: when a user clicks on a file attached to a card or canvas, that’s getting stored in Box by Kerika for that user, we use Box’s Preview function in the form of an IFRAME.
Using an IFRAME enables us to add some Kerika-specific features, like automatic version tracking, to the standard Box Preview function.
This, however, requires users to allow Box.com to set a cookie, and this can fail if the user has never permitted Box.com to set cookies, or is automatically blocking all third-party cookies in their browser: when you are using Kerika.com, Box.com is effectively a third-party to the connection.
We want to make sure people understand this can be a problem, so we have added some smarts to Kerika to detect when people who have signed up directly are blocking Box.com.
If this is the case, a pop-up dialog box will appear explaining why the Preview function won’t work correctly without allowing Box.com’s cookies to be stored in the browser.
