Cards shouldn’t really have very long titles, most of the time, since the details of the task are better described within the card itself, but sometimes having a really long card title is unavoidable.
This is a problem that we have encountered ourselves, for example when we want to track bugs: if our Java-based server software records an exception (error), we need to track at least the top-level of the stack trace that we get from the Java virtual machine that’s running the server software, and this can get pretty long because it includes a bunch of critical information like the time stamp, process ID, etc.
Cards with really long titles
Previously, Kerika’s UI wasn’t super-friendly when it came to long card titles: the entire card title would be displayed when you were viewing a Task Board or Scrum Board, but when you opened the card to view its details, the UI would only show the two lines of card title at a time.
(And this was by design: when we first designed Kerika, we really did think that 2 lines of text would be plenty for most people!)
With our latest release we have eased up on this: when you open a card, you can see the entire title, even if it is pretty long.
(Not that we want to encourage you to write really long cards!)
One of the coolest features in Kerika is how well the system alerts you to changes made on your Task Boards and Scrum Boards that you haven’t seen — i.e. because you were working on another board at the time your coworkers made changes, or maybe because you were fast asleep in a different timezone!
Whenever a coworker makes any change to a card that you haven’t seen — moving the card to a different column, changing its description, changing its tags, leaving some chat, etc., the change is highlighted on the card using orange.
Smart highlights
And when you catch up on that change, e.g. open the card and read the new chat, the orange highlight gets turned off automatically.
(You can also mark a card’s changes as “read”, using the right-mouse-click menu.)
These smart highlights are great for distributed teams, and indeed for any person who is involved with multiple projects because it lets you catch up on what’s changed while you weren’t looking.
Now, these smart higlights are even smarter: if a card has multiple changes to it that you haven’t seen, e.g. it has a new attachment and it has new chat, Kerika keeps track of which changes you have caught up with, and which ones you haven’t.
In this example, if you read the chat, the orange highlight of the chat icon will go away, but the orange highlight of the attachments icon will remain until you catch up on the new attachments as well.
When you first use Kerika, your browser has a reassuring sign that your connection to our servers is being encrypted:
No warning when you first use Kerika
But as soon as you open a card that contains any attachments, e.g. files stored in your Box account if you are using Kerika+Box, this reassurance would disappear, and instead you would see a warning about “Mixed Content”, which basically means that some of the data shown on your Kerika page was coming from a source that wasn’t using HTTPS.
Why there is a mixed content warning
This was because of a small bug in how we were dealing with the thumbnails we got for files stored in your Google or Box account: for faster performance we were caching these on our own Amazon S3 cloud storage (so we wouldn’t have to keep getting them from Google/Box every time you open the same card.)
It turns out that we weren’t fetching the thumbnails from S3 using HTTPS, which meant that as soon as you switched to the Attachment view of a card, your browser’s address bar would show the “mixed content” warning.
There was no real vulnerability resulting from this, but it did interfere with the user experience for that minority of users who like to keep a sharp eye on their browser’s address bar so we have fixed that with our latest release.
Now you should always have the warm reassurance of seeing the green secure site symbol on your browser when you open a card!
Where dates are shown on Kerika’s boards and cards, we try to show them in relative terms rather than absolute terms.
For example, if something was updated today, we use the word “Today” instead of the actual date.
There’s a simple reason for that: relative times and dates are much easier for people to comprehend than absolute values. In other words, it’s much easier for someone to comprehend “5 minutes ago” than “Dec 30 2014 3:58PM PST”.
Absolute dates and times may be more accurate, but relative values are a whole lot easier to process for regular humans.
One problem we had with our display of relative times, however, was that they were not continuously updating — instead, they relied upon the page being refreshed in order to show the most accurate relative time description.
For example, if something was updated “2 minutes ago”, the phrase would remain displayed on the screen for a long time, if the page was never refreshed. This obviously can lead to confusion, since users are not going to be aware of when they last refreshed a page.
With our newest release, we have fixed that problem: relative times will still be in use, but they will update themselves automatically, so that “5 minutes ago” will soon become “10 minutes ago” and then “1 hour ago” without the user having to do anything.
The Tags filter button, which appears on the top-right corner of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards, lets you filter your view of a crowded board by showing just those cards that match a particular tag that you are using (or a particular color coding):
Tags button
It used to be that when you were filtering your view of the board, you couldn’t add any new cards.
The reason made sense from a technical, geeky perspective, but it proved confusing and frustrating for our users, so we have added more flexibility by letting you add new cards even while you are using filtering.
The new cards will appear as you add them to the board, and stay there until you refresh your view of the board. At that point, whether the new cards continue to appear or not will depend upon whether they meet your tags filtering criteria or not.
That sounds complicated, we know, so let’s take a look at the original logic behind not letting users add cards while using tags filtering…
In the example screen shown above, the board has a bunch of tags defined, like admin, box, bug, canvas, and cleanup.
Suppose we were using filtering, to only show those cards that are tagged bug and box. With this filtering in effect, you are going to see only a small subset of all the cards that exist on the board — only those cards that have either bug or box as a tag. (Or both.)
So, what should happen if you add a new card to the board, which isn’t tagged bug or box?
From a strictly logical perspective, this new card shouldn’t be displayed, because it doesn’t match the filter criteria you are currently using — it should be displayed only if the new card had bug or box as one of its tags.
We originally dealt with this problem by saying that you couldn’t add new cards while using tags filtering, because the new cards would disappear immediately after you had added them, which we felt would make for a very confusing user experience.
(People would likely think they failed in their attempt to add a new card, and keep trying. Eventually they might turn off tags filtering, and then find they had added many copies of the same new card.)
So, that was one solution to the problem, but it still presented a user experience challenge because many folks would forget that they had turned on tags filtering, especially if they were bouncing around between multiple boards. (Yes, Barb, we are looking at you!)
If a user returned to a board and didn’t realize that they had tags filtering turned on, they would get confused as to why they were unable to add new cards.
We thought of a couple of different solutions to this problem, including the use of callouts (those balloon-like bubbles that appear to give you hints about how a page works) but we aren’t generally a fan of callouts — too many apps misuse them to excess these days.
So we have come up with what we think is a better solution: if you are using tags filtering, go ahead and add new cards. They will show up, but if you refresh your page, your tags filtering will be re-applied, and the new cards will be displayed only if they match the tags you want to show.
A tiny change in labeling in our latest version will, we hope, make it clear that Kerika’s Export feature is actually pretty smart about managing the amount of data that you export from a board:
Exporting subset of board
What used to say “Export cards” now says “Export the cards shown”.
“Cards shown” means just what it says: if you are hiding some columns from view, or filtering your view of the board to show just those cards that match particular colors or tags, then only the cards currently shown are going to be exported.
This makes it really easy for you to manage what information goes into an export: if you don’t want the Backlog of a Scrum Board to be included, for example, just hide the Backlog from view before clicking on the Export button.
Cards in the Done or Trash column, of a Task Board or Scrum Board, cannot be modified without first moving them out of Done or Trash: this is different from how boards worked before, and we made this change as part of our recent update where we introduced the concept of Archives.
Done cards
There are a couple of reasons why we did this:
It seems like common-sense: if you have deleted a card, or marked it as Done, why would you be making changes to it? If the card needs changes, or someone wants to do chat or any other updates, that card isn’t really deleted or done, is it?
It matches the behavior of Archived Projects: when you move a project into the Archive in your account, that project is frozen in its current state, and remains frozen while it is in the Archive.For symmetry and ease of understanding of the concepts of “Done” and “Archive”, it made sense that Done cards should also be frozen.
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 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.
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