For folks that need to manage production of YouTube videos, we have a helpful template that will set up your Task Board in minutes:
The workflow itself is simple: To Do → Researching → Recording → Editing → Designing Graphics → Scheduled → Done.
We have included useful links and suggestions in the first column to help you if you are new to YouTube video production. Here’s an example, on how to produce a video description:
Check it out and let us know if we can improve it.
For our marketing users we have created a new template: how to create a Branding Framework for your company or product, in the way that Netflix does.
To give credit where it’s due, this template has been adapted from The Three Tools Netflix Used to Build Its World-Class Brand | First Round Review, where Gibson Biddle talks about how this framework was used at Netflix for their branding strategy.
What do you need to achieve for branding? Well, Gibson believes it requires answering three questions about your company:
A brand is the unique story that consumers recall when they think of you.
The template walks you through the process, step-by-step:
The next time you need to do a branding exercise for your company or product, use this template. And let us know if we need to improve it.
A large number of our users are from small nonprofits (and they get free use of Kerika under our Academic & Nonprofit Plan!) and to help these folks manage their grant pipeline better we have create a new template that’s available to everyone:
This simple, yet very flexible, template lets your nonprofit team track all the grant opportunities that are out there, and make sure they get attended to as they go through the process: Prospect → Qualified Lead → Prepare Grant Application → Await Response.
As the possible grants move through the process, for each opportunity you need to track at least this information:
Not all of this will be available in the Prospect stage, but it needs to be gathered in the Qualified Lead stage for sure: otherwise, your lead isn’t really qualified, and you are not going to be in a good position to win that grant.
Creating this, and other templates for nonprofits, are all part of our “social good” mission.
Check it out and let us know if we can improve it.
We have a new template for folks that need to organize a marketing campaign photoshoot, or any other professional business photoshoot:
The template contains a step-by-step guide, with each task laid out as a separate card on a Task Board. Here’s an example of a task:
As you can see, this template contains not just a list of tasks, but also useful links for folks who are doing this for the first time.
Cards also contain a checklist of subtasks, where appropriate:
Check this out, and let us know if it needs improving!
We got feedback from some users after our last big release on how we could improve the user experience for folks who like to use the auto-numbering feature for Task Boards, and we have made these changes:
When you open a task, it’s number is shown (but can’t, of course, be edited)
You can now search for a numbered task simply by typing “#number” in the Search box
We have completely rebuilt Kerika’s search capabilities, both on the back end and on the user interface, to make it much easier to find tasks (cards) and documents across all your Kerika boards.
Search results are organized into two tabs at the top: Tasks and Documents.
Within each tab, results are further segmented into two tabs: This Board, and Other Boards. This makes the most common use of Search even easier: most people want to find something that’s on a large board that they are viewing.
For each search result Kerika shows you what part of the task/card matched the query; in the example above, the search term showed up in 8 Board Chat messages.
Clicking on a search result gives you two action buttons: Open the task/card, or get a link to that task.
The search results are ranked by relevance; we spent weeks fine-tuning the algorithm based upon real-world usage and we think we have got it right now! But we know there will be times when you really need to narrow your search very specifically, and that’s handled by the Filter Results button which gives you so many options:
The Documents tab shows you all the content that matches your search results: we get this from Google, if you signed up using your Google ID or email, or from Box, if you signed up using your Box ID.
Selecting a document result gives you two buttons: OPEN, which will open the document for you in a new browser tab (or in Google Apps or Box on a mobile device), and DOWNLOAD.
As with Tasks, there are numerous options to filter and narrow your search for documents:
We have done a bunch of things to help folks who need to work with multiple Kerika accounts: a common situation with consulting, outsourcing, or other professional services who need to work with clients who all have their own Kerika accounts.
It starts at the Home page, where we made it easier to filter you view of Boards and Templates to a subset of all the Kerika accounts you can access:
You can use the check boxes in the left navigation area to temporarily hide some accounts, if you want to narrow your view of boards and templates.
More importantly, you can now access boards from different Kerika accounts in the same session: you don’t need to log out of one account and log into another, to be able to quickly switch between boards from different accounts.
The Board Switcher, which shows all the boards you currently have open, across accounts:
It’s also easy to set your preferences on a per-account basis:
The Dashboard (previously labeled “Views”) has new capabilities so you can get a great overview of all your projects, across all your accounts:
This makes it as easy to filter your Views on desktop as we had previously done for mobile users.
With the new version you will notice that Kerika has become much faster on the desktop than previously: now any board, regardless of size, should load in under 3 seconds if you have a fast Internet connection.
With the old version this wasn’t true: the time to load a board was proportional to the number of cards (tasks) that were on the board, and while most users didn’t notice any lag, people who were using Kerika at a large scale, e.g. with boards of a thousand cards, would have to wait a while for the largest board to full open.
With our old code, every board was loaded sequentially column by column, starting with the leftmost column, and within each column every card was loaded before another column’s loading started. This approach didn’t scale well, and the flaw of this approach became all to obvious when we built our mobile apps, which used a “lazy loading” approach.
To fix this, we rewrote the desktop app from scratch, an effort that took nearly nine months for our small team to complete, from design, implementation, testing and endless refinement.
With lazy loading the system prioritizes which cards to load, rather than trying to load all of them one by one. If your board has 15 columns, for example, not all of these can be viewed at the same time: most displays will show just 5-6 columns at a time. Kerika keeps track of which part of the board you were last viewing, and then intelligently loads the board from that point of view.
All the other columns are loaded only as the system senses you are going to need them: as you scroll to the left or right, for example, the system automatically (and quickly) fetches more columns into view. If the system does this fast enough, the user never realizes that her entire board wasn’t loaded at the very beginning, because no matter where she is looking, everything she needs is always in view.
We took a similar approach to loading columns with a lot of cards (tasks). Instead of loading all the cards that exist within a column — and these can number hundreds, for large boards — the system considers how many can be displayed at a time given the user’s particular device: laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone.
Having calculated how much of a column can be actually viewed by a user, the system loads just those many — and a few more in anticipation of the user scrolling her view of a column. As the user continues scrolling down a column, the system races to fetch more cards from the server so there’s never a gap in the user’s view.
But lazy loading alone wasn’t enough, we also had to deal with the speed at which a browser can display a bunch of cards. This speed varies by browser type, as well as device. A low-powered computer, perhaps running an older browser, can’t render cards as fast as we need for the user to have a true real-time experience.
We have redesigned the Task/Card details dialog to provide a more space-efficient layout, so you can see more of what you need without having to scroll:
What used to be vertical tabs for Details, Chat, etc., is now a compact horizontal tab; this frees up a lot of space to see the details of the tags.
The other big change we made is to make the Priority setting separate from other Tags:
Clicking on the star will bring up your task priority options:
We hate to see anyone leave, of course, but that doesn’t stop us from improving the experience of users who want to close their Kerika accounts.
You can do this by selecting the My Profile option in the dialog that appears when you click on your avatar, on the top-right corner of the Kerika app:
The My Profile pop-up dialog looks like this:
Click on the Leave Kerika button, and Kerika will email you a 6-digit numeric code that you can use to confirm that you really want to leave.
This extra step helps ensure that you really mean to do this, because the exit, once completed, cannot be reversed: all your old boards will be deleted permanently: