Facebook Home on Android: a great way to monetize the addicts

Ephemera, Technology

In many industries, a small proportion of the users will consume a disproportionate amount of the product, and will provide the vast bulk of a company’s profit.

This is true in the beer business for example: the beer companies have long known that a small percentage of their customers will drink a vast amount of beer every day. (This factoid used to be a staple of marketing classes in the 1980s, when it was offered as an example of the 80:20 rule — 20% of the consumers will drink 80% of the beer. Which actually amounts to about a case of beer a day…)

It is also true for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses: Forbes reported in 2011, for example, that just 4% of Dropbox’s users pay for the service, and yet Dropbox is a growing, profitable company! The other 96% contribute indirectly, by adding to the network effect and recruiting others who have a 4% probability of becoming a paid-up subscriber of Dropbox.

These percentages can seem small, but they can quickly add up when you have millions of users.

Facebook has a similar profile of users: a small number of people are logged in obsessively, and these will provide the bulk of their advertising revenues — not just because they are more like to see the advertisements, but because they are more likely to view Facebook as a trusted source of useful content.

In this context, creating Facebook Home on Android makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t matter whether a very large proportion of your user base never uses it, if you can get the addicted segment to be logged in all the time. These people will drink all the beer you are selling.

How Kerika integrates with your Google Contacts

Technology, Usability

When you sign up for Kerika, using your Google ID, you get sent to an authorization screen where Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to access some of your Google-related information. One part of this involves access to your Google Contacts.

We often get queries about this, so we thought we would clarify something that’s really important: we don’t use your Google contacts to spam your friends and coworkers!

The Google Contacts are used for one reason only: to provide an auto-completion of names and email addresses when you are adding people to a project team. Here’s a simple illustration:

Adding people to a project team
Adding people to a project team

To add people to a project team, you would click on the People button, which appears on the top-right corner of the Kerika application, and this would show a display similar to the example above, where all the members of your project team are listed (along with their roles). To add a new person, you would click on the +Member link at the top, and then start typing in a name or email address:

Enter a name or email address
Enter a name or email address

As you type in a name or email address, we pass on this string to Google which tries to match it up with entries in your Google contacts. These entries start showing up immediately, and get filtered progressively as you type in more characters:

Matching names against your Google Contacts
Matching names against your Google Contacts

This matching of names and emails is done by Google, which means Kerika never has direct access to your Google Contacts!

This auto-completion is a handy feature: it eliminates a major source of errors, which is mistyping email addresses. This means that the chances of you inviting the wrong person to your project are much lower!

 

 

Making sure you never miss a project update

Usability,

In addition to the styling changes we have made, we have also been working to make sure you always have easy access to your project updates, by improving and extending the onscreen notifications you get from Kerika. There are a whole bunch of improvements in our newest version:

  • Kerika reminds you when you are hiding a column on a task board: using the Workflow button, you can always personalize your view of a task board, hiding some columns if they are not of interest. Now, Kerika makes sure you don’t forget that you have some columns hidden, by showing a small indicator above the Workflow button:

    Indicator that you are hiding some columns on your task board
    Indicator that you are hiding some columns on your task board
  • And, if there are updates to cards on columns that you are hiding, these will never get missed:
    Updates on cards that I am not viewing
    Updates on cards that I am not viewing

    Clicking on the Workflow button will show you clearly which hidden columns have updates:

    Updates on hidden cards
    Updates on hidden cards

    In the example above, the “This Sprint” and “In Development” columns are currently hidden from view, and there are updates to cards on the “In Development” column.

  • If you have several projects underway, Kerika makes it easier than ever to know which of them have updates that you haven’t seen. This is done in two places in the user interface: first, your project tabs show orange indicators when there are unread notifications:
    Updates are highlighted on project tabs
    Updates are highlighted on project tabs

    And, when you are browsing your list of projects, you see orange highlights on the project cards as well, to let you know there are unread updates:

    Updates are highlighted on project cards
    Updates are highlighted on project cards
  • And, finally, a new feature makes it easy for you to find updated cards within columns, which is especially useful when you are dealing with a lot of cards, e.g. in a Product Backlog:

    Finding the next updated card in a column
    Finding the next updated card in a column

As with all our product improvements, the Kerika team has been testing the changes extensively by “dogfooding” the software: we use Kerika for all of our work, and we have been very pleased with these improvements which have really improved our own team productivity!

 

A cleaner look to Kerika: more open, more fun, and with clearer highlights

Usability

We have some styling changes in our latest version of Kerika, which we think makes the user interface seem more open and inviting, and makes it even easier to see highlights and notifications.

The new styling is something that we had been mulling over for a while: a number of users had said that the old styling was a little “too grey” (our thanks to Yakup Trana for being among the earliest to provide this feedback). The new styling essentially reverses the old look of grey cards on a white background.

The new look for your project cards is like this:

New look for project cards
New look for project cards

The cards are easier to read, and more clearly defined. (We have also tweaked the color of the grey border around the cards, to make it slightly darker which makes for a crisper look.) A lot of the old horizontal lines have been removed as well, which makes for a cleaner look. By contrast, this is the old styling:

Old view of project cards
Old view of project cards

The contrast between the two is quite dramatic: the new Kerika is a lot cleaner and more inviting!

The new look for your task cards is like this:

New view of task cards
New view of task cards

Task cards are easier to read, and the important highlights and notifications are also more crisply delivered. Here, by contrast, is the old Kerika styling:

Old view of task cards
Old view of task cards

Once again, a dramatic contrast, and clearly for the better! We have been testing this new styling within the Kerika team for the past 3 weeks, and have been continually tweaking it on a daily basis. We now feel it is the best we can do! Let us know what you think.

Google Plus doesn’t seem to like TIFF files; Mac’s Grab and Preview utilities are more annoying than ever…

Usability

We just encountered a weird bug in Google+: after being prompted over several days to upload a larger image as our cover photo, we decided to get a larger screenshot of the Kerika application.

On a Mac, there are several ways of doing this, but the most direct way is to use Mac’s Grab utility. This utility used to be a lot easier to use before Mountain Lion’s “improvements”: now, Grab disappears after you switch to another application, using the Cmd-Tab keys, which is really annoying because you have to relaunch it all the time.

But, that isn’t really our main beef right now… One long-standing annoyance of Grab is that it saves files in the TIFF format. We have no idea why: TIFF seems like a really ancient format these days.

If you try to upload a TIFF file to Google+, however, the file shows up inverted for some reason. This seems to be a weird bug on Google’s part: TIFF files, alone, are being inverted when they are uploaded.

To get around this, you have to save your TIFF-based screenshot as a PNG file (or JPEG, but then you have to make sure you don’t lose resolution in the process). This means opening the TIFF file in your Mac’s Preview utility, and then trying to save that as a PNG file.

Saving a file as a different type used to be simple with the old Preview, but no more: another one of Apple’s annoying “improvements” has been to eliminate the “Save As…” option from Preview’s File menu. So, you have to do something completely counter-intuitive: you need to duplicate the file, using the Duplicate option of the File menu, and then close that new window. Closing the new window alarms Preview enough to prompt you to save the file, at which point you are finally presented with a dialog box that lets you select the file type you want.

And then it’s back to Google+ to upload your new PNG screenshot…

Google and Apple are considered the leaders in usability, so there we have it: this is the state of the art!

A new template for our users: The Business Model Canvas

Technology

We have added a new template for our users: The Business Model Canvas.

The Business Model Canvas is an increasingly popular tool for startups to systematically analyze their proposed business model by identifying:

  • Key Partners
  • Key Activities
  • Key Resources
  • Value Propositions
  • Customer Relationships
  • Channels
  • Customer Segments
  • Cost Structure
  • Revenue Streams

Using this template is easy: when you start a new project, you will find “Business Model Canvas” among the choices for Task Board projects:

Selecting the Business Model Canvas as the template
Selecting the Business Model Canvas as the template

You can also access the template directly at https://kerika.com/m/GFXC, and click on the “Use this template” button on the upper-right corner to get started fast.

Once you start your new project using this template, your task board looks like this:

Using the Business Model Canvas
Using the Business Model Canvas (Click to enlarge)

Each of the main sections of the Business Model Canvas are presented as columns on this task board, and you can customize this as you like:

Customizing the Business Model Canvas
Customizing the Business Model Canvas

Individual cards on this task board are setup and ready for you to fill in; here’s an example:

Individual cards for the Business Model Canvas
Individual cards for the Business Model Canvas (Click to enlarge)

The card shown above, as an example, can be used to identify one of your key suppliers. For this supplier (and for all of your other key suppliers), you should identify the motivations of this supplier: why this supplier would want to do business with you? Motivations could include:

  • Supplier is seeking optimizations and economies of scale
  • Supplier is seeking to reduce risk and uncertainty
  • Supplier is looking to acquire particular resources and activities.

For each supplier, you should identify the key activities that will be performed: this can added to a simple Google Doc, and attached to this card. (We have provided Google Docs templates for individual cards.)

And, finally, for each supplier you should identify the key resources that will be acquired; this can be added to the same Google Doc, or listed separately.

In this way you can easily work through the business model canvases various steps.

Using a process template like Kerika’s is vastly superior to simply printing out a large poster of the canvas, because the cards in the Kerika process template can be used to support conversations, manage content, track status, and collaborate across multiple locations: and that’s just not possible with a paper canvas!

The Business Model Canvas is also gaining popularity within larger organizations that are seeking to adopt (and adapt?) lean startup principles, so we expect that this new template will be of interest to a wide variety of users. And, by the way, creating this template is just part of an ongoing process here at Kerika, to capture and present best practices for a variety of professions and industries!

Agile for large and distributed teams: conversations with Al Shalloway, Mike DeAngelo and the Wikispeed team

Kerika, Team Collaboration, Technology

Three great conversations about Agile and Scrum in recent days, with Al Shalloway of the Lean Software and Systems Consortium in Seattle; Mike DeAngelo, Deputy CIO of the State of Washington; and Clay Osterman and Joe Justice from Team WIKISPEED in Lynnwood. Common threads in these conversations:

  • Scaling up Scrum to large projects (e.g. the global WIKISPEED team numbers close to 300 people), and
  • Adapting Scrum for distributed teams (where people are located in multiple offices).

Agile purists might well recoil at the prospect of Scrum teams that can’t be fed with a single large pizza (the traditional rule-of-thumb for the optimal team size, still followed at companies like Amazon) or having to deal with people in multiple locations that can’t have face-to-face contact., but these are real-world problems for many organizations, and simply saying “No”, because the idea of very large or distributed teams offends one’s theology about Agile, isn’t a useful stance to take.

Increasingly, large organizations are distributed across cities, timezones, and even continents, and complex systems require large delivery teams. A pragmatic approach is necessary, not a purist one: we need to consider how we can adapt the basic principles of Scrum to meet the real-world needs of large organizations. Here are some lessons learned over the years in how to adapt Scrum for large or distributed teams:

  • Let multiple project teams push/pull items from a single Backlog, so that many small teams can work in parallel on a single system, rather than a single, large team take on the entire Backlog. This requires coordination among the various teams through a “Scrum of Scrums”: each individual team does it’s Daily Standup, and then the Scrum Masters of each team participate in a second meta-Standup where they report to each other on their particular teams’ progress and impediments.
    To succeed, you need project tools that make it very easy to have multiple teams push and pull items from a single Backlog. The project management system must make it easy for any any member of any team to have real-time visibility into the progress of every other team, so that the task of managing dependencies can be pushed down to individual team members rather than concentrated within the Scrum Masters. (Leaving it up to the Scrum Masters alone to manage all the inter-dependencies leaves you with the same single-point-of-failure that you have with traditional Waterfall approaches.)
  • Try stay within the “1 large pizza” size for individual teams. There’s a simple, practical reason why you should avoid having individual teams become much more than 8 in number: the Daily Standup takes too long, and people start to either under-report, or tune out much of the discussion.

    If a team has 20 people for example, and each person simply took 30 seconds to say what they had done, 30 seconds for what they plan to do next, and 30 seconds to describe impediments, that still adds up to a 30-minute long Standup!

    When faced with a Daily Standup that has become something of an ordeal, people tend to under-report, as a coping mechanism, and, frequently, what they under-report (under-discuss?) are the impediments.

    This can be fatal to the team’s overall success: problems and worries are not discussed very well, and eventually accumulate to the point where they become fatally large.

  • Split up the work, not the team. If your people are distributed across multiple locations, it is far better to split up the work rather than the teams: in other words, give each location a different set of deliverables, rather than try to get people working in several locations to work on the same deliverables.
    Too many organizations, particularly when they first built onshore-offshore teams, cling to the myth of “following the sun”: the idea that a team in India, for example, could work on a deliverable during Indian working hours, and then hand that work off at the end of the day to a California-based team that is conveniently 12-hours away.

    This is the myth of continuous work: the notion that the same deliverable can effectively be worked on 24 hours a day, by having two shifts of people work on it in non-overlapping timezones.This simply doesn’t work for most knowledge-intensive professions, like software development or product design.

    A huge effort is needed to hand over work at the end of each workday, and invariably there is a significant impact upon the work-life balance of the people involved: either the India team or the California team, in our example, would have to sacrifice their evenings in order to accommodate regular phone calls with the other team. Eventually (sooner rather than later), people get burned out by having their workdays extend into their evenings on a regular basis, and you are faced with high turnover.
    Splitting up the work means you can have loosely-coupled teams, where there isn’t the same burden of keeping every person aligned on a daily basis. A project tool that makes it easy for everyone to have a real-time view of everyone else’s work is essential, of course, but you no longer have to have Standups that would otherwise easily take up an hour each day.

What do you think? Let us know your best practices!

The right way to do a right-click

Usability

There was a debate recently, within the Seattle Tech Startups email forum, about the pros and cons of offering a right mouse-click option within Web applications.

The right-mouse click is, of course, a desktop paradigm, so the question is: when, if ever, is it a good idea to supersede the browser menu with your own right-click menu?

Here’s where we stand on this issue:

  • Our users want it, overwhelmingly. Because Kerika’s user interface is consciously designed to mimic a desktop application, with simple mouse gestures for dragging cards across a project board or drawing on a canvas, our users naturally expect to have a right-click menu available.
  • Our menu options are better than the browser defaults. The browser defaults are generic, of course, and have little value in the context of the Kerika application. For example, a commonly used browser action might be to select some text and then search for that on the Web. Within the Kerika application, this isn’t a particular useful or commonplace action. If you want to search for something related to a project, you probably want to search within Kerika itself, rather than the entire Web.
  • The right-click menu is always supplemental, never central. We don’t offer anything on a right click menu, in any scenario, that isn’t also available through more explicit buttons or menu options. The right-click menu offers faster actions to commonplace actions, based upon user context, and it is designed for “power users” who want to absolutely minimize their mouse actions. For everyone else, regular menus and buttons offer all of Kerika’s functionality in a more explicit manner.
  • The right-click menu is always contextual, never generic. If you are going to take over the right-click, make it count: don’t offer a generic set of actions, but instead offer a highly tailored, context-sensitive menu of actions. For example, if you are working with shapes on a canvas, the right-click menu offers fast access to changing the appearance of the objects. But if you are working with Web links on a canvas, the right-click menu offers a different set of choices, like switching between a bookmark and an embedded view.
  • The right-click belongs on tablets, too. Something that’s often overlooked in this debate is that the right-click menu is easily accessible on iPads, too: a “long tap” acts as a right-click, so there’s no reason to not make use of that function.

What do you think? Let us know…

Another week, another update: this time, it’s mostly styling (and better user management)

Kerika, Technology, Usability

We are trying to get back to a faster rhythm of releases. Our goal is to have releases within 3 weeks: we want to complete our development and QA within 2 weeks, and then use the third week for “dogfooding” the software.

(As you might expect, we are fervent users of Kerika! Everything related to our business is done using Kerika project boards, and to make sure we are putting out the best possible product, we use a daily build of the software on a test server. This keeps us firmly on the bleeding edge of our own software development: it means that we get to try out our software in a real-life scenario — one that is absolutely mission-critical for the company! — before we pass it on to our users.)

Our newest version, released today, contains a number of under-the-hood fixes that will help us manage our growing number of users. And, we are happy to report, our users are indeed growing: we are adding new users in March at twice the rate we did in February!

From your perspective, it’s mostly some styling and minor user interface changes that will be visible. We have a better way to expose the Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete functions for cards, having heard from too many users that they couldn’t easily figure out how to delete projects, we have more uniform use of colors, and there is a right-click menu for dealing with project cards as well as task cards.

The more uniform use of colors is a step towards a larger update/refresh of our look-and-feel. We have been hearing from users that our user interface is “too grey”, and we are working on that issue. We are also looking at improved notifications, both onscreen and through emails. Stay tuned!