Coming up: a “unified inbox” view of all your projects

Usability

We should be wrapping up yet another new version of Kerika in the next few days: we have been focusing on how to make it easier for people to get to all of their projects, across all the accounts they are working in.

Some quick background: Kerika lets you create projects in your own account, of course, but also in the accounts of other people who have added you to their project teams. This means that over time you can end up creating, and working on, projects that are owned by several different accounts. Our users have asked for this to be improved in two ways:

  • Users want to make sure they are creating projects in the right accounts, so people want to get a little reminder of which account is being used, each time they create a new project.
  • Users want fast access to all of their projects, across all of their accounts.

Here’s what we are doing to help: first, make it clear to you which account is being used to create your new project. The dialog for creating a new project will look like this:

New Project dialog

So, right up front you can see the name of the account you will be creating your new project in, and the face of the account owner. If you want to create your project in a different account, you can switch right on this dialog with one easy action.

The second big change is to create what we call a “unified inbox” view of all your projects, similar to how email clients work that let you see all your emails in one place, across all your accounts.

When you are looking at your projects, the “My Projects” link will show you all your projects, across all your accounts:

Unified Inbox

Just below the “My Projects” link are all the accounts that you have access to, starting with your own (which is always called “My Account”), and followed by the accounts that have projects that were updated most recently. This makes it easier for you to access not just all your projects, but also the accounts that are most active.

This improvement, like everything else we have done, has been driven by valuable user feedback! Next up, once we get this version wrapped up, is simpler billing system and integration with the Google Apps Marketplace and the Google Chrome Web Store.

Coming up: a simpler pricing for Kerika

Kerika

We are moving to a simpler pricing scheme for Kerika:

  • As before, you can start with a free Standard Account, which will let you have two other people work on your projects.
  • Once your team grows past that point, you can upgrade to a Professional Account, which we are offering at a simple rate of $10 per user, per month (billed annually).
  • Academic & Nonprofit users can still request free service, which will now allow for up to 10 free users per account.

Three key changes with our new pricing:

  • You won’t have to buy “packs of licenses” any more: you can buy just as many as you need.
  • The new rate is higher, but reflects the tremendous increase in functionality since our November release of task boards, Kanban boards and Scrum boards.
  • The refund policy is simpler: instead of changing the subscription end-date, you will simply get a refund for the unused portion of any Professional subscription that you had purchased.

Our new pricing will continue to be very competitive, with tremendous value for your money because:

  • There are no limits on the number of projects you can create within an account.
  • There are no limits on the number of cards that you add to a particular project board.
  • There are no limits on the files that you share as part of a card (the size of your Google Drive is entirely between you and Google.)

All of our competitors are offering very complicated pricing schemes that limit your freedom to create and reconfigure projects as needed. But not us.

And, as before, we will continue to use Google Checkout for our billing, which means we will never see or store your credit card information.

When prosecutorial misconduct lurches from farce to tragedy

Technology

Aaron Swartz didn’t have to be driven to suicide by the horrific prospect of spending decades of life in prison for the “crime” of publishing taxpayer-funded research. There’s a petition at the White House to fire Assistant US Attorney Steve Heymann, who proudly put out this press release on July 9, 2011 to pat himself in the back:

If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.

That’s 35 years in prison for publishing taxpayer-funded research — yes, that’s right: we are talking about research funded with your tax dollars. And the farce that’s wrapped up inside this tragedy is that JSTOR, which housed the research that Aaron downloaded, has already decided to make all these documents available free to the public.

When someone screws up this badly in the private sector, he is fired, fast, and deservedly so. Why not in the public sector as well?

Google+ with a custom URL is useless for businesses

Kerika

Google is making a huge push to get everyone to create a Google+ account, but it’s hard to see how this is going to succeed when Google+ is missing a very basic feature that every single business needs: the ability to create a custom URL, e.g. plus.google.com/kerika.

We have been updating our website and social media channels recently, and as part of that process we created a Google+ page for Kerika and ended up with the utterly useless URL of https://plus.google.com/110330426240622128664/posts

This isn’t a URL that even we can ever remember, and it certainly offers no incentive for us to publicize it. “Kerika” is a registered trademark and a registered service mark, so obviously it is important for us to use our name in all of our marketing. All other social media offer custom URLs: we have facebook.com/kerika, twitter.com/kerika, linkedin.com/kerika — even youtube.com/kerika! — but not plus.google.com/kerika!

It’s difficult to fathom Google’s foot-dragging in this matter: custom URLs don’t need to be offered to every single user — and its very difficult to manage a namespace if you tried to offer up custom URLs to hundreds of millions of people — but it is an absolute “must-have” feature for every business. All businesses care deeply about their product names: these are valuable intellectual property assets, and we cannot think of any business that would want to publicize a random 24-digit number instead of their own name.

Until Google gets this very basic feature implemented, there is no rational argument to be made for a business to take Google+ seriously…

Improved integration with Google Drive, faster performance, and full iPad support

Usability

Along with our best wishes for this holiday season, we have a small present to put under the tree as well: a new version of Kerika will be available on Christmas Day! This new version will come with:

  • Improved integration with Google Drive: now, you will be able share any kind of files, including music, videos, Flash, and other binary data, simply by adding them to your project cards or canvases. (When you log into Kerika again, you will be asked to reauthorize Kerika’s access to your Google Apps,)
  • Improved performance: projects should load at least twice as fast as they did before, making it a lot easier to use Kerika in coffee shops and other places with unreliable WiFi.
  • Full, fun iPad support: you will be able to access your Kerika projects using the Safari or Chrome browser on your tablet (no need to download any apps).
  • Better support for visitors: you can give project stakeholders (like your clients, for example) read-only access to your projects. They will be able to view everything in your projects except for your chat, which will remain private to the team members.

There are also usability tweaks:

  • Attachments can now be opened with a single click.
  • The “Move” action can now be found in the menu at the top of the columns.

What we are working on next:

  • A consolidated view of all your projects, similar in concept to the “unified inbox” you find on your smartphone.
  • Easier ways to manage your account, and integration with the Google Apps Marketplace and the Chrome Web Store.
  • Work estimation, work logging, and exporting of project data.

Thanks again for all your support: the very encouraging feedback we have been getting from our users continues to fuel our efforts!

60 usability improvements (and we are not done yet!)

Kerika, Technology

Kerika got updated today, with around 60 usability improvements based upon feedback from our early adopters. Many of the changes are quite small, but you should notice that now it is even easier to:

  • Add people to projects.
  • See who is part of each project.
  • Chat about cards.
  • Work with templates.
  • Catch up on updates from coworkers.
  • Use Kerika’s unique canvas feature.

There’s also a simpler and easier welcome experience for new users, and improved performance with faster downloads.

And speaking of performance, that’s our next focus: we want to kick that up quite a bit, so it’s even easier to use Kerika with public WiFi networks like coffee shops.

Giving real thanks, this Thanksgiving

Kerika, Technology, Usability

This Thanksgiving holiday, we have good cause to be grateful to all the folks who gave us detailed feedback on our new task management software, and helped us identify about 25 different improvements that we plan to make over the next week covering areas such as:

  • Eliminating any confusion that might exist regarding project privacy;
  • Making it easier to edit card titles;
  • Making it easier to chat on individual cards;
  • Improving the emails that are sent when people are added or removed from projects;
  • Improving the overall performance, by at least by 50%;
  • Simplifying the experience for new users;
  • Simplifying the use of canvases and whiteboards;
  • Adding helpful hints throughout the product; and
  • Eliminating references to “Kanban” which some people find confusing (without eliminating any functionality).

We will be updating Kerika next week, and will continue to release new versions every two weeks, and over the next month we plan to market and publicize the software more.

Task management comes to Kerika

Kerika, Technology, Usability

At long last, task management comes to Kerika!

We are launching a brand-new version of Kerika this weekend: the fruits of over 8 months of intense research and design of the only taskboard that’s designed specially for distributed teams. There’s a short video that we urge you to watch: it provides a good overview of Kerika’s new capabilities:

  • You can organize your work using cards on a virtual task board: the interface is easy to understand and delightful to use.
  • Each card can contain details of the work, and, of course, you can add content from your laptop or the Web to each card.
  • Each card can be assigned to one or more people from your project team: Kerika lets you see at a glance who is working on what.
  • Chat is integrated directly with your work: you can send messages that are attached to your cards, or the entire taskboard.
  • You can get started with one of our standard project templates, or create your own process templates to reflect your organization’s best practices and proprietary methodologies.
  • Kerika’s unique whiteboard capabilities are integrated with the new task management: you can add a canvas to each card for sharing ideas, and everything updates in real-time as usual.
  • And our special focus continues to be the challenges faced by teams that are distributed over different locations — it could be that you are working with people offshore, or simply working from home: Kerika makes it easy for you to see, at a glance, exactly what’s changed on each work item in each project.

As usual, we look forward to your feedback! (Contact us by email.)

A new user interface, with much improved usability

Kerika, Technology, Usability

We are launching a brand-new version of Kerika, with a completely reworked user interface and a ton of new features including support for iPads and other full-sized tablets.

The new UI is different enough that we have put together a 2-minute video that we recommend you watch before you sign in next; it will really help you get the most out of the new software. The interface is new, but all your old projects and data are all intact!

The new interface is part of a larger transformation we are undertaking that will add project management capabilities to our existing collaboration features: we want to provide support for Kanban-style projects, Agile/Scrum projects, and customized workflows. We have finished designing the new features and if you would be willing to take a look at our mockups and give us your opinion, it would be greatly appreciated!

Meanwhile, please enjoy the new version, particularly if you have an iPad or other full-sized tablet. To access Kerika on your tablet, just log into the kerika.com site using your tablet’s browser: there is no need to download any app because we have rebuilt the user interface to work just fine inside your tablet’s browser.

How to tell if a file has been updated

Kerika, Technology

The first version of Kerika was written as a peer-to-peer (p2p) application, so one challenge we faced was detecting when files that are being shared as part of a project were changed by a user, so that we could send the latest version to everyone else on the team.

Our first attempt at a solution was to simply examine the Last Modified time for files. However, this proved to be very unreliable for a rather odd reason: whenever you open a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel, it automatically updates the Last Modified time to be the current time – even before you had made any changes.

And when you close Excel, without having made any changes, it resets the Last Modified time back to its original value. So, whenever you opened a Excel files for viewing, we would erroneously identify it as an updated file.

We then tried looking at the size of files, to see if these had changed since we last examined them. We knew, of course, that this would be error prone in its own way: if you change some text within a file such that it contains the same number of characters as before, the overall size of that file would not change.

But this approach failed for another reason altogether: Microsoft Word allocates disk space in chunks at a time, rather than as exact amounts. This means that any edits to Word files that do not require Word to grab another chunk, or give up a chunk, would never be reflected in the reported size of the file.

Eventually, we decided to take the MD5 hash of files, which is a more reliable way of detecting if a file has been modified. We were concerned about how much CPU overhead this would take, but it proved to not be a problem after all.