Tag Archives: Task Board

About Task Boards. See also Kanban and Lean.

Kerika’s New Search Capabilities

January 9, 2022TechnologyBox, Document Management, Google Apps, Scrum, Search, Task Board, Task Management, UsabilityKerika

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.

Screenshot showing Task results from Search — Search Task Results

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:

Screenshot showing Task Filter options for Search — Task Filter

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.

Screenshot showing Document Results from Search — Search Results for Documents

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:

Screenshot showing Documents Filter options for Search — Documents Filter

We made it easier to work with multiple Kerika Accounts

December 22, 2021Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, UsabilityAccount, Task Board, Task ManagementKerika

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:

Screenshot showing Kerika Home page — New Kerika Home

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:

Screenshot showing Board Switcher dialog — Board Switcher

It’s also easy to set your preferences on a per-account basis:

Screenshot showing Account Preferences — Account Preferences

The Dashboard (previously labeled “Views”) has new capabilities so you can get a great overview of all your projects, across all your accounts:

Screenshot showing Dashboard Settings — View Settings

This makes it as easy to filter your Views on desktop as we had previously done for mobile users.

A more space-efficient layout for Task Boards

December 19, 2021Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, UsabilityKanban, Scrum, Task Board, Usability, WorkflowKerika

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:

Screenshot showing the Task Details dialog — Task Details

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:

Screenshot highlighting position of Task Priority field — Task Priority flag

Clicking on the star will bring up your task priority options:

Screenshot showing possible values for Task Priority — Task Priority

Cards are tasks, so we are renaming cards as Tasks

December 16, 2021UsabilityTask Board, Task ManagementKerika

If you have a engineering background, you will be comfortable calling the items that show up on Task Boards as “cards” — a term that originated with Kanban production lines in Japan, and then found its way to Scrum boards everywhere.

But for everyone else, “card” is a somewhat obscure, even baffling term, and we would often get asked a fundamental question: “what should I put on a card?

To make this clearer to folks, we are renaming cards as Tasks, because that’s what a Task/Card is: something your team needs to get done.

This is really a cosmetic change: wherever you had previously seen the word “card” you will now see either “task” or the more generic “item”. The ADD A CARD button, for example, is now ADD NEW TASK:

And what had previously been called “tasks within cards” (or sub-tasks), is now more simply called a Checklist:

Screenshot showing a Card's Checklist — Card Checklist

Again, this is a change in terminology, not a change in functionality, but we hope it will make Kerika easier for the wide variety of users we have across the world, ranging from companies and governments all the way down to schoolkids.

Task counts for columns

December 13, 2021Kanban & Lean, UsabilityKanban, Task Board, UsabilityKerika

With our new user interface we made it easy to see how many tasks (cards) there are in a single column: the count appears at the top of each column.

Screenshot showing how column headers include a count of tasks in the column — Task counts for columns

We are moving away from Scrum Boards

November 9, 2020Agile & Scrum, Kanban & LeanAgile, Scrum, Task BoardKerika

We are transitioning our Scrum Board users to Task Boards: the Scrum Boards are used only by a tiny portion of our user base, who overwhelmingly prefer using Task Boards and Whiteboards.

Background

For many years now we have offered both Task Boards and Scrum Boards, but the relative popularity (and implied usefulness) of these two are lopsidedly in favor of Task Boards.

The main difference between Task Boards and Scrum Boards has been the use of a shared Backlog: a column of cards that can be shared by several Scrum Boards at the same time.

In Scrum Boards, the Backlog appeared fixed in the leftmost column of the board, and like Done and Trash, it couldn’t be be moved, renamed or deleted.

The Backlog was “live” all the time in the sense that any change made by one attached Scrum Board to the Backlog was immediately reflected in every other Scrum Board that was attached to the same Backlog. If Scrum Board A added a card to a shared Backlog, it immediately showed up in the Backlog column when viewed by Scrum Board B and Scrum Board C.

The Problem

This wasn’t a good way to implement Scrum Boards, as we found out ourselves during our internal use of these boards. It’s principle weakness was it led to a proliferation of Scrum Boards, since each Sprint required a new Backlog. (Our own development team is currently on Sprint 180 so we experienced this proliferation early on.)

We though the general feature in Kerika that lets accounts archive old boards would help, but this just pushed the proliferation problem to another area; it didn’t really fix it.

The Solution

We are just going to have Task Boards (and Whiteboards) from now on. At some point in the future we may completely rethink, redesign, and rebuild a new kind of scrum boards, but it doesn’t make sense for us to continue offering the current version.

As a consequence, all existing Scrum Boards will be converted into Task Boards. Here’s how that would work:

Consider an existing set of boards that all use the same shared Backlog: Board A, Board B, and Board C.

Right now all three boards see the same Backlog, at the same time: if cards are added or moved away from the shared Backlog by any board, this view is immediately updated for all three boards.

When we transform Scrum Boards to Task Boards, each of Boards A, B, and C will have its own local copy of the Backlog.

From this point on, any changes made by any of these boards to their local copies of the Backlog will not affect the copies that were made for the other boards. Each board, then, becomes independent and can proceed on its own path, without affecting any other board since there is no longer a shared column of cards.

Questions?

We have already been in touch with active users of Scrum Boards and have not heard any concerns from them about this proposed change, so we are confident that we are making the right decision. If you do have any questions, please contact us at support@kerika.com.

All that’s been happening lately

September 7, 2020Kerika, UsabilityAccount, Kerika, Task BoardKerika

We have been lax in updating this blog, sorry, but not lax at all in working on improving Kerika, especially for mobile browser users. We are also getting close to releasing our mobile app, which will contain the same functionality as you get today when you access Kerika on a phone, but it will be packaged as a traditional-looking app for folks that want an icon on their desktop.

Here’s a short list of things that have been improved and added in the past few months:

For mobile browsers

There’s more of the desktop functionality now available on phones as well, including:

Managing the columns on a board: adding new columns and changing existing columns so you can customize the workflow of each board.
Drag-and-drop to reorganize items within lists: the order of columns, the order of tasks and attachments within a card, etc.
The Home Page (which we will be calling the Explorer, in anticipation of other anchor pages that we will roll out soon) has more complete abilities to manage your boards, templates, archive and trash, including favoriting items.
The Contact Us (to get help) feature has been implemented.
The Manage Profile feature has been implemented, including changing your name, photo and password.
The My Preferences feature has been implemented, and redesigned for both the desktop and mobile to make this easier to use.
We have made performance improvements across the board, although we continue to push the boundary on this. (One of our own boards regularly has over 700 cards so we are our toughest users and testers.)
A bunch of styling tweaks to help improve usability and readability, and there’s always going to be more coming in the future.

For desktop users

A bug that caused Views to not be properly updated for some users has been fixed.
When you switch from your current board to another open board and then return to the first board, Kerika will remember the scroll position so you can pick up where you left off without any delay.

For both mobile and desktop

The Preferences section has been reorganized to make it easier to use.
We have made some tweaks to make it easier to sign up, change passwords, etc. (And there’s more coming on this front.)
Users who signed up after getting an invitation from someone else will start off just having access to the boards and accounts they were invited to; now they can create their own account as well if they want to use Kerika for private work using the same email address.
Fixed some issues with our billing system that caused us to be underpaid in a few instances. We are going to do a big overhaul of our billing system later this year (hopefully) to make it easier for both Kerika and our customers.

A new tutorial video on Views & Highlights

December 19, 2019KerikaHighlights, Kanban, Scrum, Task Board, Task Management, ViewsKerika

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlvPwdD5Ifw

Guarding against XSS/code-injection

December 3, 2019Kerika, TechnologyChat, Scrum, Security, Task Board, WhiteboardKerika

It’s possible to copy-paste text into a Kerika Chat message, and there are legitimate use-cases for this: for example, a developer may ask a question to a coworker who replies with a code snippet.

Kerika handles code in chat messages by storing two versions of the message: as plain-text, and as the original format. When a chat message is displayed, the original format is used but not executed, which means the embedded code is visible, but doesn’t run in the browser. This makes it easy and safe to share code snippets through chat messages.

While making this improvement, we went through all the places where a user can type in text, Card Title and Description, Board Name and Description, Tag, Attachment Name, etc. to make sure we are guarding against malicious code injection.

An easier way to search for cards by number

December 2, 2019Agile & Scrum, KerikaScrum, Task BoardKerika

Along with the recent improvements we made to the Auto-Number Cards feature for Task Boards and Scrum Boards, we have also made it easier for you to search for cards by their number.

It’s simple to use: just type in a number in the Search box on the top of the Kerika app and Kerika will assume you are looking for a card with that number. It will also search for anything else with that number, but will prioritize a card matching that number as the first result it shows.

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