Tag Archives: Usability

About software usability in general.

Redesigning the Whiteboard Toolbar

Usability,

We did an update to the toolbar shown on Whiteboards (and canvases attached to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards), and while that modernized the look of the toolbar — and removed some usability problems with the old design — in retrospect it didn’t do a good enough job of simplifying the interface 🙁

Current Canvas Toolbar
Current Canvas Toolbar

The problem with this design was that it mixed together two different functions:

  • Providing drawing function, e.g. drawing a rectangle on the canvas.
  • Providing context-specific functions, e.g. linking an image to an external URL.

To improve this design, we are reverting to a very old style: having the drawing buttons appear on the left side of the Kerika canvas:

New Canvas Toolbar
New Canvas Toolbar

Now, all the functions that put content on the canvas: shapes, lines, files, Web content, etc. are shown on the left edge of the canvas, and the context-specific items — e.g. changing the color of a selected shape on the canvas — are shown on the top.

Using a left-edge toolbar goes back to the very first version of Kerika, although back then we had rather embarrassing styling 🙂

Using Filters with your Task Boards and Scrum Boards

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

A new tutorial video that shows you how Kerika’s powerful Filter feature lets you customize your view of any Task Board or Scrum Board: just see those cards that are assigned to you, or create more custom views of a board by selecting cards based upon their status, tags, or the people assigned to work on them.

You can even hide entire columns on the board if you like 🙂

 

How Project Settings Work in Kerika (A Preview of Coming Attractions)

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

Here’s a teaser video of the new Kerika user interface, which we are getting close to releasing…

Among other things, we will consolidate and improve a bunch of project management features under a new “Project Settings” button.

Check it out:

Deleting canvases attached to cards

Agile & Scrum, Technology, Usability, , , ,

You can attach as many canvases as you like to cards on Task Boards or Scrum Boards, and if you don’t need them anymore, you can delete the canvases.

Here’s how you add a canvas to a card:

Adding a canvas to a card
Adding a canvas to a card

By default, the new canvas is simply called “Canvas”, but like with any other attachments on a card, you can easily rename it by clicking on the pencil icon that appears to the right when you hover your mouse over it:

Renaming a canvas
Renaming a canvas

Clicking on the “x” button at the far end will let you delete a canvas that you no longer need:

Deleting a canvas
Deleting a canvas

If the canvas is empty — which means that there is nothing visible on the canvas, and nothing in the canvas’ Trash either — you see a simple confirmation message asking if you are sure you want to delete it:

Deleting an empty canvas (confirmation)
Deleting an empty canvas (confirmation)

But, if the canvas is not empty, you see a Restore option instead:

Restoring a deleted canvas
Restoring a deleted canvas

If it seems puzzling why a canvas that appears empty isn’t really empty, make sure you open the canvas and take a look at the Trash: there may be items there that you had previously removed from the canvas:

A canvas that looks empty but isn't
A canvas that looks empty but isn’t

In this example, above, the canvas looks empty but isn’t really: there are items in the Trash.

In situations like this, Kerika is careful to avoid losing all your work: until you empty the Trash on a canvas, the canvas isn’t considered to be truly empty, and until a canvas is truly empty, it cannot be removed from a card.

So, in this example, you see the Restore option rather than the Delete option:

Restoring a deleted canvas
Restoring a deleted canvas

How to undo a “Cut” operation

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

Cutting and pasting cards from one Task Board to another, or from a Task Board to a Scrum Board for that matter, is easy and simple with Kerika: just select the card, and then click on the “Cut” button that appears at the top of the column:

Cut button
Cut button

You can cut several contiguous cards within the same column by shift-selecting them, and then clicking on the Cut button.

And, you can also access the Cut operation by using the right-click mouse menu:

Right-click menu
Right-click menu

Cutting-and-pasting is effectively a move operation: it moves the card intact, along with its details, tags, attachments and chat, from one place to another.

You can cut and paste within the same board, of course, but this is pointless since it is much easier to drag cards from one column to another.

Cutting and pasting cards from one board to another is much more useful, and it doesn’t matter if the source is a Task Board or Scrum Board, and the destination is a board of different type — or even if the destination is a Template.

But what should you do if you click on the Cut by mistake? Well, that’s easy to undo: just click on the cut cards — which will appear slightly greyed-out — and the cut operation will be cancelled!

3 shades of grey are plenty

Technology, Usability

Some techies in Seattle may like up to 50 shades of grey, but at Kerika we try to stick with just three:

Kerika Grey
Kerika Grey

This is easier said than done: there’s a lot of grey in the Kerika user interface, and as we add new features or tweak old ones, it’s easy to slip and introduce new shades of grey.

So, periodically, we need to take digital color meter and examine the Kerika UI in detail, pixel-by-pixel, to look for stray shades of grey.

Limiting the palette of grey to just 3 shades is an example of how constraints can help designers.