Tag Archives: Usability

About software usability in general.

An improvement to Card History

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, Usability, , , ,

Every card, on every Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, contains within it a full history: a log of all the changes that have been made to it.

(A few actions are ignored because they can occur so often, and are often inconsequential, e.g. moving a card up/down within the same column. In contrast, moving a card across columns is considered consequential, and is therefore logged in the card history.)

We recently made a usability improvement in the way the Card History appears: the log of changes is now shown in chronological order, rather than reverse chronological as was the case before.

This makes history look more like chat, and should make it more usable!

Making sure all Project Leaders are equally empowered

Usability,

On any Kerika Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard, you can have as many Project Leaders as you like.

(Normally, teams prefer to have just a single Project Leader, but sometimes it is helpful and appropriate to designate more than one person as Project Leader; among other things it provides redundancy, so that the single Project Leader doesn’t become a bottleneck for handling requests.)

Just how active a Project Leader is depends upon the dynamics of the team: in some teams the Project Leader is just an administrative role, filled by someone who is like a Team Member in every other respect in terms of how much work she takes on, while in other teams the role may be more formal.

It turned out there was a bug in how Kerika handled notifications and requests when there were several Project Leaders on a single board: these notifications and requests were getting routed to just one Project Leader instead of all of them, so there was still a potential for having a bottleneck.

With our latest release we have fixed that problem: now, all notifications and requests get routed to all Project Leaders, so any of them could act upon it. This should remove the bottleneck!

Easier to tell who moved a card to your board’s Trash

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Technology, Usability, , , , , ,

When a Team Member deletes a card, it just gets moved to the board’s Trash; it doesn’t get immediately deleted from Kerika’s database even though it disappears from your view right away.

That’s because the “delete” action in Kerika is really a “move to Trash” action: you are removing something from view, but not necessarily getting rid of it for good.

Any Team Member can delete a card, but only a Project Leader can completely and permanently get rid of it — in other words, “taking out the trash” is one of the privileges reserved for Project Leaders (and Account Owners).

The Trash column is normally not shown on your Task Board or Scrum Board, but you can bring it view easily by clicking on the Filter button:

Making Trash visible
Making Trash visible

 

With our latest version, it’s easy to see who moved the card to the Trash: we show this right on the card itself.

Seeing who deleted a card
Seeing who deleted a card

“In Progress”: a new Kerika feature

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, , , , , ,

We are adding “In Progress” as a new status tag for cards, on Task Boards and Scrum Boards, that we think will make it easier for everyone to see which items are actually moving along.

In Progress
In Progress

Couple of reasons why we did this:

  • People get assigned too many cards sometimes, even when they are working with a “Pull” model (as opposed to “Push”), sometimes even using Work-in-Progress (WIP) Limits don’t solve the problem of easily seeing exactly what’s being worked on at any time.
Template example
Template example

In this process template, we have three buckets of activities: Background Check, IT & Facilities Setup, and Onboarding, and we have a separate In Progress column that you could use to indicate which card is currently in progress.

But, with a “In Progress” status indicator on cards, you wouldn’t need that extra column: you could work on cards from any of those three buckets and indicate their status right there. And when the work gets completed, these cards can go straight to Done!

Bug, fixed: handling filenames with Cyrillic characters

Usability,

A Russian user kindly alerted us to a bug that we have now fixed: filenames that used Cyrillic characters were not getting uploaded correctly, because of an encoding problem.

The problem had to do with Kerika not using a sufficiently large character set, which resulted in some languages not being supported properly.

We have fixed that by moving away from the UTF8 character encoding to UTF8MB4, which is an encoding format used by MySQL databases.

UTF8 uses a maximum of 3 bytes per character, which limits the range of languages that can be supported.  UTF8MB4, however, uses a maximum of 4 bytes per character which considerably extends the range of possible characters.

Distinguishing between “Rescheduled to” and “Scheduled”

Usability,

As we were “eating our own dogfood” with the new Planning Views feature, we increasingly found a need to distinguish between cards that had been scheduled for the first time, and those that were being rescheduled because they didn’t meet their original due dates.

This was probably a useful distinction for us to have made even before now, but the new Planning Views made it really important to tell which cards were slipping and which weren’t, and anyway, that’s the whole point of “dogfooding”: we use what we build, extensively, before we give it to our users, and that’s how we make great software 🙂

So here’s a simple enhancement that we think will help all teams: if a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board is rescheduled, i.e. given a new due date, the card will flag that like this:

Rescheduled Due Date
Rescheduled Due Date

As soon as you click on the card, the orange highlight gets turned off, and the due date is shown like any other date:

Regular Due Date
Regular Due Date

Filtering by People: a new feature

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Technology, Usability, , , ,

When you are working with a large board and a large team, it’s often useful to see just those cards that are assigned to some people.

For example, you might want to just see those cards that are assigned to you, so that you can focus on getting your stuff done and not get distracted by everything else that’s going on.

With our newest release of Kerika, we have made this both possible and easy.

One quick menu choice, within our new Filter dialog, will make it possible for you to filter your view of a Task Board or Scrum Board to just see the items assigned to you:

Just my items
Just my items

If you are a Project Leader, you might want to filter your view of a board even further, and Kerika makes that easy:

Filter by People
Filter by People

 

This view is particularly handy if you are trying to deal with staffing issues: for example, if one person has called in sick, you can first filter your view to show just the items assigned to that person, and then add more cards to your view to see how busy someone else on the team is, if you are thinking of offloading the sick person’s work to someone else.

Filtering by Status: a new feature

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Usability, , , ,

Here’s another way that Kerika makes it easy to manage really large Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can use the new Filter dialog to show just those cards that are flagged as having a particular status — for example, you could view just the Critical items, or just the Needs Rework items:

Kerika has several  flags you can use to identify the state of the cards on your board:

Card status
Card status
  • Ready to Pull: this means the card is ready to be picked by someone within the team, in accordance with the project’s workflow.
  • In Progress: this signals the card is being actively worked on by someone; it helps call out which cards are active, among several that may be assigned to the same person.
  • Needs Rework: this calls out the need for a “do-over” of some part of the work — e.g. if a design fails review, or work was not done as expected on a particular card.
  • On Hold: this indicates that the person assigned to that card has put it aside temporarily, usually because the person got diverted by some other work (which presumably is now marked as “In Progress”).
  • Is Blocked: not good; it means that the person who has been assigned that work is not able to progress as they would like to, due to forces beyond their control. Time for the Project Leaders to intervene!
  • Critical: hopefully this gets used sparingly…

Use Kerika’s new Filter by Status capability for your project status review meetings: it’s easy to see which cards are going well, and which ones need help.