A new tutorial video on how you can easily draw curved lines and arrows on Kerika’s canvases and Whiteboards:
Adding a Twitter feed to your Kerika canvas
Did you know that you can embed a Twitter feed on your Kerika Whiteboards? It’s simple: just click on the “Add Web Content” button, and then enter the Twitter handle:
Kerika automatically figures out the “@” refers to a Twitter ID, and then finds and embeds the Twitter feed right on your canvas:
Using animation to help users understand canvases can be attached to cards
We have been cautiously adding animation to the Kerika app — as noted previously — where we think it helps people understand the results of their actions, and why a visual context just changed as a result of something they did.
One such place is when you add a canvas to a card: we added a “blow-up” animation effect to help users understand that they are opening up a new canvas.
To complement this, we added a “collapse” animation when you navigate up from a canvas to the card that contains it, whether you do that by clicking on your browser’s Back button or by using the Kerika breadcrumbs that appear just above the canvas:
This collapsing animation effect helps reinforce the idea that the canvas you just left was attached to a particular card, and now you are back up a level and viewing all the attachments on that card, including the canvas you were just viewing.
Adding a Google Map to your Kerika canvas
Did you know that you can embed a Google Map in your Kerika Whiteboards? It’s easy: just copy the Google Map’s URL:
And paste it into the dialog box that appears when you click on the “Add Web Content” button on your canvas toolbar:
Kerika automatically figures out the URL refers to a Google Map, and shows you an embedded map on your canvas:
You can do the same thing with card attachments, for your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: Kerika shows a small thumbnail of the map in the list of attachments on your card:
UI tweak: removing the “Add member” button from card details
As part of our work on combining tags and colors, we have been cleaning up parts of the Kerika user interface that had minor inconsistencies.
One such inconsistency — in our view — was that you were able to add people to a project team from within the card details dialog itself:
This button has been there in Kerika for a very long time, but it doesn’t really make sense to have this capability within the card details dialog: it just isn’t the best place to decide to add someone to a project team.
Instead, in our new layout the Project Settings dialog consolidates all the board management in one place, including adding people to a team, changing someone’s role within a team, and removing someone from a team:
UI tweak: showing attachments in chronological order
It used to be that when you added content to a card — files from your laptop or Web content from your Intranet or the Internet, or a canvas — the newest content was added at the top of the list.
Of course, you could always rearrange them, by grabbing and dragging them up or down the list, but this it not a feature that many users discovered on their own :-(
Well, for greater consistency with how the chat and history are shown within a card’s details, we are now going to show attachments in chronological order as well — the latest files and URLs that you added to a card will appear at the bottom of the list, and the view of these will be automatically scrolled to show the latest items:
Using Chat in Kerika
A new tutorial video, showing you how Kerika’s Chat combines the best of instant messaging and email, and lets you have very focused conversations on your Task Boards, Scrum Boards and Whiteboards:
Using animation to provide a “sense of place”
Animation often gets a bad reputation, and often this reputation is well deserved because too many designers and developers use animation gratuitously: just because they can, or just because they want to show off their technical skills.
At Kerika we have been very cautious about using animation, and have generally restricted its use to scenarios where it can help give users a “sense of place”: providing transitions from one display to another, so that a user has a sense of having journeyed from one part of the system to another.
Animations are particular useful when returning to where you come from: an effective animation can help users understand that they have returned from their journey.
Using animation to unfold drop-down dialogs helps the user understand that the dialogs are literally unfurling on top of the Task Board or Scrum Board: in other words, the user isn’t going anywhere different, just unfolding another display for temporary use.
With our latest version, we added some more animation: now, when you open a card on your Task Board or Scrum Board, it will appear to literally open in front of your eyes.
Animation is also used when you close a card: it appears to collapse in front of you in a way that draws your eye to its position within a crowded column.
This kind of animation, we believe, is useful rather than gratuitous: it helps the user understand what is happening when she opens or closes a card.
(We may consider some other touches of animation where we think it could help provide useful transitions, but we have to be mindful of the performance hit of animations as well…)
An easy way of keeping track of sub-tasks
With our latest update, it’s become easy to keep track of sub-tasks for cards on a Task Board or Scrum Board; here’s an example:
In the example shown above, the second item in the numbered list has been been taken care of, and so it has been struck-through, making it clear to the rest of the team that it isn’t an issue any more.
We have added the capability of marking text within card details with a strike-through, and this, combined with the easy way in which you can create numbered lists, makes it easy to track sub-tasks!
UI tweaks: new icons to allow for a future feature
At the time we added “In Progress” as a new status value, we also removed the “Done” status, mostly because the drop-down list of status choices was becoming rather long — and “Done” was not quite like all the other choices that we were presenting for marking a card’s status.
This is what the old choices looked like:
And this is what the new status choices look like:
There are two small UI tweaks here that we made:
- A purple color is now used for “Needs review” — this previously was green, but green was really the best choice for “In Progress”, and we didn’t want to use the same color for two different states.
- The icon for “Critical” has been changed to look like a fire: that’s because we want to reuse the old triangle icon in the future for a great new feature that we are still brainstorming — a way to mark certain cards as “troubled”.