We have added an Undo option for all Sort actions on Task Boards, to make it easier for you to use the sorting function without worrying about making a mistake.
Enjoy.
Tag Archives: Usability
You can now choose your background colors
A new feature that we recently introduced will let you choose a background color: one for the desktop app, and one for the mobile app. (Oops, did we just talk about the mobile app?)
To select a color: click on your user profile photo, which appears on the top-right of Kerika:
Select My Preferences for this Account from this dialog, and you will land on a revamped Preferences page that now includes options for selecting a background color:
We are offering a range of light and dark backgrounds; in our own testing we found that the darker backgrounds look better on the desktop, while the lighter backgrounds look better on phones. But, of course, that’s just our opinion — try this out and select what you like best!
An updated tutorial video on how Whiteboards work
As part of our continuing series, we have produced an updated tutorial video on how Whiteboards work in Kerika, both as standalone project boards, and when attached to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards:
Embedding a Twitter feed in a Kerika Whiteboard
Here’s a feature that we suspect most people probably don’t know about: you can embed a live Twitter feed on any Kerika Whiteboard.
While working on a Whiteboard, click on the Add Web Content button that appears in the left-hand toolbar, towards the bottom:
You can reference Twitter feeds with a simple “@” symbol: you can add Kerika’s Twitter feed just by typing in “@Kerika”.
The Twitter feed appears as a live object on your Whiteboard:
You might find it convenient to rename the URL to something more descriptive: you can do this by selecting the object and using the right-mouse button to get this menu:
How Notifications work in Kerika
An updated tutorial video shows you how you will always know what changed on all your Kerika boards, even when you are working on the other side of the world.
An improvement to our Views function
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:
- The total number of items that match for that View, and
- The number of items that match that are assigned to you.
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.
Our Views feature just got even better
We have improved our Views feature to include a simple toggle that lets you filter the entire View to show just those items that are assigned to you.
This new toggle appears on the top-right corner of the View, and we have added a Tip to help you understand the function:
Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:
All the other items are hidden from the View, and a simple count at the bottom of each column shows you how many items are assigned to others. In the example shown above, 1 item is assigned to someone else, and is due today.
It’s a simple, fast feature that we think shows the best of Kerika’s design approach 🙂
This feature has been added to all of our Views that need this:
- What’s Due
- What Needs Attention
- What Got Done
Making Kerika less chatty for new users
It’s hard for us to get the balance right between making sure our users don’t miss out on important project updates, while avoiding the impression that Kerika is “too chatty”.
We are changing out default preferences settings — this will affect new users only, not existing users — to have most notifications emails turned OFF by default:
One reason for this change is that our Views feature does a good job of providing an overview of important updates across boards — and we are going to make it even better in the near future — so for new users in particular, we don’t want to give the impression that Kerika will increase their incoming emails, rather than actually streamline their existing communications.
You can now hide columns in your Views as well
For some time now we have offered the ability for you to hide entire columns on a Task Board or Scrum Board; we are now extending that to Views as well:
In the example shown above, several columns are hidden in this What Needs Attention view, and Kerika shows a count of how many items are hidden in each column.
This feature is available through the Column Actions button that’s at the top of each column:
This can help you focus in on specific work items that need more attention than others.
Some usability improvements to the Billing Info screen
We noticed a number of folks were tripping over the process of entering their Billing Info (from the Manage Users page), which was embarrassing…
We have made some minor tweaks that we think will fix any potential confusion:
- If you miss a required field — and remember: every field is required except for additional Billing Contacts — the system does a better job of getting you to pause and fix the mistake.
- The process of selecting a Country and State/Province has been made easier. If you select the USA or Canada as your country, the State/Province field becomes a drop-down list since we know which states and provinces to present as choices in each case. If your country is something else, this field becomes a free text field to let you type in anything you want.