In the recently added Highlights feature, we let you create your own custom highlights:
We fixed a problem where “This Week”, “Next Week”, etc. wasn’t including Overdue Tasks and cards, which could give users a somewhat misleading impression of what they needed to get done in a particular week or month.
After all, if something is already overdue, you will need to get that done this week along with anything that’s scheduled for this week!
We fixed a bug that was kind of annoying: if you had a Custom Highlight defined for one board, and then switched to another open board, the Custom Highlight was getting applied automatically to the second board as well.
This happened only if people used the Board Switcher button that appears on the top left of the Kerika app:
The Board Switcher keeps track of all your open boards and is a fast way to switch between them if you are working on several different projects at the same time — you don’t have to go back to the Home page to find your boards again and again.
Every of your open boards can have Highlights set, or not, as you like. This bug fix makes that a smoother process.
We really like the Tasks feature that we introduced recently: this has significantly cut down on the number of cards that we have to track on boards, since many items can be easily captured, assigned and scheduled as tasks rather than independent tasks.
This means we have a better, epic-oriented view of our boards; we don’t get lost in the weeds.
However, the first implementation of the styling could do with some improvement, so that’s what we did:
This makes it easier to see the names of people assigned to cards, and the due dates, more easily.
By the way, it took a surprising amount of experimentation before we settled on these colors: in Kerika’s design every color is supposed to have a particular meaning, so that colors appear in a consistent context in every instance.
For example, if we use blue to indicate a clickable link — like we do on the card details left tab, to let you switch between Tasks, Attachments, Chat, etc. — we can’t use blue anywhere else where it wouldn’t be clickable.
So, if blue is clickable in one place, it must always be clickable everywhere else.
This is easy enough, but we also have rules about using colors consistently across actions or displays that seem related, again to minimize the learning effort needed by new users.
Our green is used for Highlights in a consistent way:
The breadcrumbs includes the suffix “What’s Assigned to Me” in green, the Highlights button is green to indicate that it is in use, and a green button is used to indicate that items matching the highlight are out of view.
If we are rigorous about this, there is an internal consistency about the Kerika user experience that makes it easier to learn. But it takes a lot of discipline.
So if consistency applies a bunch of constraints in our choice of colors, so do legibility and color-blindness: we have to be careful to avoid using color combinations like red and green that are difficult for some people to distinguish. (About 8 percent of males, and 0.6 percent of females, are red-green color blind in some way or another, whether it is one color, a color combination, or another mutation.)
All of this means that it isn’t easy to pick a new color when we design!
We have replaced the old Filters feature for our Task Boards and Scrum Boards with a new Highlights feature that we think is better in every way!
Click on the Flashlight icon on the top right corner of the Kerika app:
And you will see this menu of actions:
The default is No highlights. We have a couple of built-in highlights that we know you will find useful right away:
Here’s how the Highlights work:
A shadow effect helps spotlight all the cards that match the highlight, making them literally pop out of the screen!
If you are working on a board with a lot of columns, there’s always a chance that something that is being highlighted is currently out of view — if, for example, it is near the bottom of a long column.
Kerika takes care of that as well: if a card that matches your highlight choice is currently out of view, a green button appears at the top or bottom, as needed, of each column to indicate that there are cards out of view that match your highlight.
The green arrow acts as more than just an indication that you need to scroll: it is also a button that will scroll the column to show you the next card that you need to see.
(Pretty cool, huh?)
We will be adding more smart highlights in the coming weeks, but in the meantime you can also create your own custom highlights:
A Custom Highlight can include any combination of people assigned to cards, status, due dates and tags.
For the due dates, we have offered several smart options that are a lot easier to use than standard date pickers:
These ways of specifying due dates — like “Due Next Week” or “Next Month” — make it even easier to set up a custom highlight.
Enjoy.
We have added a new feature to our Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can now manage a list of tasks for each card on a board, like this:
Every card can have as many tasks as you like, organized in a simple, smart checklist.
Individual tasks can be assigned (to one person at a time) and scheduled, and Kerika is smart about rolling up these assignments and due dates to reflect them on the card as well:
As you mark off tasks as Done, they slide to the bottom of the list to make it easy to see what remains to be done.
We have added a new feature to our Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards, to make it easier for Board Admins to customize the layout of their boards (i.e. to customize the workflow of their projects).
This Column Actions menu appears the top of each column, as shown below:
When clicked, the button shows the following actions that can be performed on the column:
This new button and menu makes it easy to access the most common actions that Board Admins need to organize their project’s workflow.
The Board Settings dialog will continue to support this feature, as well as handle more advanced scenarios such as boards that use Work-In-Progress limits on columns:
Note: only Board Admins can customize the columns on a board; not Team Members or Visitors.
We have added a new feature in the Board Team dialog, to make it easier to share your board’s URL:
This will be useful if your board’s privacy is set to Anyone can view this board, like in the example shown below:
You can now copy the Board’s URL to your browser clipboard, and send that to someone else as an email or instant message.
If you change your mind about making the board accessible to anyone who has the URL, you can always set your board’s privacy to Everyone in Account Team or Only people on the team.
Keith Vernon and Kaz Obrietan, talking about Kerika made an impact upon their professional services firm, over the past two years:
When you schedule cards on a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, we offer a simple way to pick a date:
We don’t support setting a specific time (e.g. 5:00PM) along with the time: these times are generally useless in most work settings and add unnecessary complexity to the user experience.
And, yet, it’s possible that Kerika reports a specific time for a due date, like in this example:
So, how did happen?
Well, Kerika took note of the fact that person making that time commitment (“I will get it done today”) was based in India.
And midnight in India is 11:30AM in Seattle — at least now, with Daylight Savings Time in effect.
So Kerika shows the Indian team member’s commitment of “I will get it done today” in terms that make sense to a colleague in Seattle:
11:47 AM Pacific Standard Time with Daylight Savings Time in force is 12:47PM Indian Standard Time; something that Kerika figures out automatically.
This simple, elegant way of handling timezones eliminates the frequent disagreements over “I meant my today, not your today…”
An example of the incredible attention to detail that Kerika brings to the needs of distributed teams.
With our latest release we have made a change to all Task Boards and Scrum Boards: the Trash column will now show automatically if it contains anything:
We made this change because the old design was too subtle: most of our users never even discovered the Trash feature, which was a really pity.
Now, the Trash column will automatically display whenever it has anything in it. We are using lazy loading for the Trash, so performance is not affected for people who have very large Trashes. (Some people, who have been using the same board for years, have hundreds or even thousands of items in their Trash.)
If you don’t want to see the Trash, you can hide it using the Filter button that appears on the top right of each board:
