Redesigning the Whiteboard Toolbar

Usability,

We did an update to the toolbar shown on Whiteboards (and canvases attached to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards), and while that modernized the look of the toolbar — and removed some usability problems with the old design — in retrospect it didn’t do a good enough job of simplifying the interface :-(

Current Canvas Toolbar
Current Canvas Toolbar

The problem with this design was that it mixed together two different functions:

  • Providing drawing function, e.g. drawing a rectangle on the canvas.
  • Providing context-specific functions, e.g. linking an image to an external URL.

To improve this design, we are reverting to a very old style: having the drawing buttons appear on the left side of the Kerika canvas:

New Canvas Toolbar
New Canvas Toolbar

Now, all the functions that put content on the canvas: shapes, lines, files, Web content, etc. are shown on the left edge of the canvas, and the context-specific items — e.g. changing the color of a selected shape on the canvas — are shown on the top.

Using a left-edge toolbar goes back to the very first version of Kerika, although back then we had rather embarrassing styling :-)

Using Filters with your Task Boards and Scrum Boards

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, Usability, , , , , , ,

A new tutorial video that shows you how Kerika’s powerful Filter feature lets you customize your view of any Task Board or Scrum Board: just see those cards that are assigned to you, or create more custom views of a board by selecting cards based upon their status, tags, or the people assigned to work on them.

You can even hide entire columns on the board if you like :-)

 

How Project Settings Work in Kerika (A Preview of Coming Attractions)

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Technology, Usability, , , , , , , , ,

Here’s a teaser video of the new Kerika user interface, which we are getting close to releasing…

Among other things, we will consolidate and improve a bunch of project management features under a new “Project Settings” button.

Check it out:

Box restores our Box Notes hack :-)

Technology

Our last blog post noted that a very useful Box Notes hack had gone away, following an unexpected update to the Box platform a couple of weeks ago.

We asked Box if they could consider adding something to their API that would allow us to restore this functionality, and their response has been very helpful and very fast!

Here’s how fast they responded:

  • July 15, we enter a support request at 6PM.
  • The next morning, Box Support put us in touch with Jon Berger, the Product Manager for Box Notes.
  • The same day, Jon talks to his dev team and commits to providing us with a fix.
  • Less than a week later, the fix is in production!

Very nice.

A nice Box hack that’s going away?

Technology, ,

For a while now, our Kerika+Box users have had a very nifty feature that allowed them to create a new Box Note from within Kerika itself, and have that note automatically attached to the Task Board or Scrum Board card that they were working on.

Adding new Box Note to card
Adding new Box Note to card

(Which meant, naturally, that this new Box Note was also automatically shared with everyone on that particular board’s project team!)

And since this was a very handy integration with Box, we added it to our Whiteboards and canvases as well:

Adding Box Note to canvas
Adding Box Note to canvas

We added this because Google Docs had equivalent functionality: Google enabled us to create a new Google Doc from within a Kerika+Google board and have that new Google Doc attached to the card the user was working on.

The trouble was, Box’s Content API didn’t really have an official way of doing this, so we came up with a workaround that worked fine for the longest time — so long, in fact, that we forgot that it was even ever implemented as a workaround…

Unfortunately, that broke a few days ago. Box did an update to their platform that stopped our workaround from working any more, which means that, at least for now, we will have to stop offering this feature for our Kerika+Box users.

Hopefully we will be able to get Box to give us official support for this feature, so Kerika+Box remains at least as good as Kerika+Google :-)