Tag Archives: Calendar

About syncing due dates with Google, Microsoft, and Apple calendars.

Introducing Planning Views: a whole new way to view your Kerika Boards!

Agile & Scrum, Technology, Usability, , , , , ,

We are delighted to introduce Planning Views, a very innovative, very unique way to view your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards!  (Yes, it goes way beyond what simple calendar views, like those you might get from other tools, work :-))

Let’s start with your familiar view of a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, which we will start calling the Workflow View from now on:

Example of Workflow View
Example of Workflow View

 

There’s now a simple drop-down that appears on the breadcrumbs, letting you switch to one of the Planning Views:

Selecting a View
Selecting a View

 

Your new viewing choices include:

  • Next 3 days: this will show you everything that’s Due Today, Due Tomorrow, Due the Day After, and beyond
  • Next 3 weeks: everything that’s Due This Week, Due Next Week, Due the Following Week, and beyond.
  • Next 3 Months: everything that’s Due This Month, Due Next Month, Due the Following Month, and beyond.

Planning Views provide a date-oriented view of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: a Planning View takes your cards and rearranges into time-oriented columns.

Here’s an example of a Next 3 days view:

Example of 3-day View
Example of 3-day View

 

Our Workflow view got neatly (and quickly!) pivoted to arrange all the cards in terms of when they are due:

  • All cards without any due date are shown first, in the Not Scheduled column.
  • Next, any Overdue cards are always shown in a special column by themselves, so they can be easily rescheduled.
  • Beyond this are columns for Today, Tomorrow and the Day After.
  • And finally, there is the And Beyond column, which summarizes all the cards that have due dates beyond the day after tomorrow.

Here’s the same board, but viewed in terms of the Next 3 weeks:

Example of 3-week View
Example of 3-week View

 

Switching between these views is super-fast, and these views update in real-time: if a due date for any card is changed by anyone on your project team, no matter where they are located, this change is instantly reflected in your view.

The Next 3-months view is an even higher-level view of the board:

Example of 3-month View
Example of 3-month View

 

All these views support smart drag-and-drop of cards: if you drag a card across, or up/down a column, the Due Date is automatically changed to reflect the new date.  As you move the card, the new date is shown in orange so you know exactly what will happen next:

Smart drag and drop
Smart drag and drop

 

Since your Planning Views aggregate cards that may be in different columns on your Workflow View, we made it really easy for you to see at a glance where each card is in terms of your workflow:

Where cards are in your Workflow view
Where cards are in your Workflow view

 

Navigating forward and backward in time is also easy, as is jumping to “today’s view” if you have navigated too far into the future:

Navigating the Planning Views
Navigating the Planning Views

 

As you navigate forwards or backwards, the “And Beyond” column magically adjusts to show you just what’s out of your current view!

Planning Views work just as well with Task Boards (if you are using Kanban) and Scrum Boards (if you are using Agile).

Check out Planning Views — it’s exactly the kind of great design and innovation that you have come to expect from Kerika…

Archived cards are not included in your 6AM task summary email

Technology,

When you archive a project, it’s possible that some cards still had Due Dates set on them: these dates are preserved along with all the other project data at the time you do the archiving.

But, these dates, which will inevitably become overdue dates over time, are not included in your 6AM task summary email, because there’s nothing you can do about them while the project remains in the Archive.

When Projects Get Done: Archive Them

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Usability, , , , ,

Here’s another new feature with our latest update: when a project is done, you can drag it to the Archive column on your Home page.

Archiving Projects
Archiving Projects

Archiving a project freezes it: no one can make any changes to it while it is in the Archive, so if you change your mind and want to make some changes to an archived project, you need to drag it back out of the Archive and into your Projects column.

All the documents attached to an Archived Project are frozen: the goal here is to preserve the final/completed state of a project and all its assets, so that later on if you need to investigate a problem — or deal with a FOIA request or some other legal disclosure requirement — you can do so with confidence.

All dates, status, chat and teams are also frozen: if someone was part of an Archived Project’s team at the time the project was moved to the Archive, they will continue to show up on that project team.

If a task had a due date and hadn’t yet been completed (i.e. the card hadn’t yet been moved to the Done column), that due date stays intact.

If the project was a Scrum Board, it will continue to stay attached to the Backlog it was using at the time the board got archived: when you view an archived Scrum Board, it will show that Backlog in it’s current state.  This makes it easy to archive Scrum Boards that represent different Sprints that work off the same shared Backlog!

You can change your mind: If you need to work again on a previously archived project, just drag it out of the Archive column and drop it into the Projects column on your Home Page, and that will “un-archive” (restore) your project.

You can create templates from archived projects: if you drag an archived project and drop it into the Templates column on your Home Page, that will create a template based upon that project, while leaving the project in your Archive.

Task summary emails got a little smarter

Usability,

One cool feature of Kerika is that you can get a 6AM email @ndash; local time, no matter where you are @ndash; that summarizes all the tasks that are overdue for you, due today, and due tomorrow.

And, if you are a Project Leader on any team, your task summary email can also include all the items that are overdue, due today and due tomorrow across the entire team @ndash; even if you are not assigned to those cards. (It’s an easy way for Project Leaders to plan their day.)

Now, these emails got a little smarter: if you move a project to Trash that still has outstanding due dates on cards, these are no longer included in your task summary email.

Our new version: Due Dates, reminders, even better usability

Technology, Usability,

Yes, another update to Kerika! You can now set Due Dates on cards, and get a personalized email summary each morning of all the work items assigned to you that are due today, tomorrow and are overdue.

We implemented Due Dates in a smart way, in keeping with our focus on distributed teams: the system automatically adjusts for people working across multiple timezones. You can read more about this on our blog.

Your personalized work summary is sent at 6AM every day, adjusting automatically for your timezone, to help you organize your day. We think it is a really handy feature, but you can turn it off if you like by setting your user preferences.

Managing your Inbox and your Sentbox (all the invitations and requests that you have sent out, that haven’t been acted upon yet) are both simpler now: there’s a separate blog post describing that as well.

There are a bunch of other usability improvements as well: you will continue to see more over the next few weeks. Thanks for your support: please continue to help us improve Kerika by providing your feedback!

How we handle Date/Time displays (in a very smart way)

Team Collaboration, Technology, Usability

We are improving our “smart display” of dates and times, to make sure they are as easy for users to comprehend as possible.

(At this point you might well be wondering: “why is this a problem in the first place? Don’t people know how to read dates or times?”)

The underlying problem we are trying to solve is that “relative time” is more useful than absolute time, if you are dealing with a short time span.

For example, the word “Yesterday” has much more cognitive value than July 19, 2013 (which is also “yesterday”, as of the time this blog post is being written). “Yesterday”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “two hours ago”, “recently”, etc. are all very powerful ways to convey a sense of how far away a particular event is from the current moment.

But, as one of users – Carlos Venegas, from Lean Office Innovation – recently pointed out, this works best for short periods of time: for example, it is helpful to know something that happened “2 days ago”, but much less helpful to be told that something happened “12 days ago”. In the latter case, the cognitive advantage of using relative time disappears and quickly becomes a burden for the user: 12 days ago is too far in the past, and now the user has to do some mental calculation to arrive at the more useful value of “June 10, 2013”.

This issue became more pressing when we built the Due Dates feature, because time doesn’t have an absolute value when you are dealing with a distributed team. For example, the Kerika team is distributed between Seattle and India: a time difference of 12.5 hours in the summer, and 13.5 hours in the winter.

This time difference is large enough to make terms like “today” ambiguous: depending upon when you are talking with your cross-border colleagues, you may have very different ideas of when “today” ends.

To address this, we made our Due Dates feature smart: it automatically adjusts for timezone differences, so that when someone in India marks an item as due “today”, Kerika ensures that people in Seattle understands what that means in terms of Pacific Time.

We also are improving our display of relative time, using a more detailed algorithm:

  • First of all, any time reference that is more than 3 days away is shown in absolute values: e.g. “July 15”, rather than “7 days ago”.
  • The concepts of today, tomorrow, and yesterday are preserved: the system figures out what timezone you are located in, and uses these terms in a smart way.
  • If an item is due by the end of the day, the time is shown using your current timezone: e.g. “11:30AM PST” rather than just “today”, for an item that is supposed to be done by the end of that day in India. This removes misunderstandings that would otherwise exist across timezones.
  • As you get closer to a time, the display gets more precise: anything due within the next hour is displayed in minutes, e.g. “45 minutes”.
  • As you get very close, the display gets a little vaguer, because of the greater uncertainty about when something might actually happen. So anything that’s two minutes away is marked as recently.

All of this makes for a very smart display of time, while keeping the user interface very simple: users set dates using a simple calendar control, without having to worry about the details of where others on the team are currently located, and how they might perceive these values!

Setting Due Dates on cards

Technology, Usability

With our next release (next week), you will have the ability to set Due Dates on cards; this is how it’s done:

Example of setting a Due Date on a card
Example of setting a Due Date on a card

The concepts are very simple, yet very elegant and powerful:

  • By default, all cards are “Not scheduled”, which means no Due Date has been set. Of course.
  • When you open up a card, you will find a new menu/button that lets you set a Due Date.
  • Due Dates are presented using words where possible, e.g. “Due Today”, “Due 2 days” ago”, etc., since these are easier for people to grasp than actual numbers.

When you set a Due Date, Kerika automatically takes into account your location, so that coworkers in other timezones understand exactly what you mean by “Due Today” or “Due Tomorrow”.

  • For example, if someone in India sets a Due Date for July 19, they expect the task to complete by midnight, July 19, Indian Standard Time.
  • When someone in Seattle looks at that card, they will see that it is due by 11:30AM July 19, Pacific Daylight Time. In other words, Kerika automatically adjusts for the 12.5 hours timezone difference that exists (during the summer) between Seattle and India.

Due Dates are presented right on the card when you are looking at a task board, and hovering over the date with your mouse will show the exact time:

Seeing the Due Date time on a card
Seeing the Due Date time on a card

In this example, the card was due three days ago, at 5PM Pacific Daylight Time.

All of this is done automatically and behind the scenes, in keeping with Kerika’s unique focus on making collaboration easy for distributed teams.

Daily Email Summary

We are introducing a new user preference, set to ON by default, that lets you get a daily summary of your most pressing tasks:

  • All the tasks that are due today.
  • All the tasks that are due tomorrow.
  • All the tasks that are overdue.

You can set the preference like this, by visiting https://kerika.com/preferences:

Preference setting for Due Date emails
Preference setting for Due Date emails

The daily email that you get looks like this example:

Example of a daily email summary of your tasks
Example of a daily email summary of your tasks

This daily email summary will get sent to you at 6AM every day, no matter where you are: Kerika figures out which timezone you are in, and sends you the email so that it’s the first thing you look at when you wake up!

When you are looking at a task board, you can easily spot the cards that are overdue – they are marked in red – and the cards that are due today – they are highlighted in blue. Here’s an example:

Due Dates are highlighted on task boards
Due Dates are highlighted on task boards

This next release is an important step on our way to implementing a Dashboard! Stay tuned…