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.
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:
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.
For new users, a new tutorial video on how you can customize the workflow on your Task Boards and Scrum Boards:
Kerika makes Scrum easy for everyone, even people who are not techies. This tutorial video shows how you can set up boards for each of your Scrum Sprints.
An updated tutorial video on how to use Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits to avoid bottlenecks in your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards:
We just updated Kerika today, and along with the usual bug fixes and other behind-the-scenes stuff we have made an improvement to the way Views are shown on your Home Page:
Some of our users have dozens of boards in active use at the same time, with large (and sometimes overlapping) teams, and as a result their Views counts are nearly always high.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the Home page now shows two counts for each View:
This makes it easier to see if you need to go back to a View to catch up on something that’s directly related to you, i.e. is assigned to you.
We are (finally!) getting around to updating the Kerika tutorial videos; what we have on our YouTube channel has definitely gotten stale.
Here’s the first in the new series:
This video is intended for new users: people who discover Kerika and sign up to start new accounts.
For people who sign up by clicking on an invitation email sent from a coworker, we have a different video that is more focused around their needs:
And, finally, for people who sign up to use Kerika with Google Apps — and this is the vast majority of Kerika users, worldwide — we have this video:
There’s a lot more coming.