We were trying out Kerika using Amazon’s Silk browser on one of their Fire (color) tablets, and found that Kerika worked surprisingly well.
On standard (un-forked) Android tablets, the Chrome browser works better than the standard browser that comes with all tablets, mainly because Google has been improving Chrome with a lot more enthusiasm than they have been improving “stock Android“.
So, we weren’t sure how good the Silk browser would behave with Kerika, given that Silk is a relatively old fork of the standard Android browser.
It turns out that you can use Kerika on Amazon’s Fire tablets quite well: just open the Silk browser, go to kerika.com, and login like you would on a laptop or desktop. Just let your finger do the dragging-and-dropping…
We made a small label change that we hope makes it clearer what your choices are for managing the privacy of your Kerika Task Boards, Scrum Boards or Whiteboards: “By Invitation Only”.
We used to have a setting that we had labeled “Team Members and Visitors”; it came with some help text that we thought clarified the issue, but which didn’t work well enough for everyone — as we found out through our ongoing conversations with users.
This is what it used to look like:
Team Members and Visitors
It turned out that not everyone was reading the help text that appears just below the choice for “Team Members and Visitors”.
So, we are tweaking the choice to say “By invitation only”, which we hope will be more self-explanatory.
By invitation only
Sometimes the best usability improvements come from just changing a few words…
We used to have Export as HTML and Export as CSV as options for our Task Boards and Scrum Boards, and with our latest version we are tweaking the Export as CSV to become Export as Excel instead.
There are a couple of reasons we did this:
We now include chat and document links in the export: this was done specifically to help our many government users who need to respond quickly to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
(See our separate post on how Kerika makes FOIA-compliance one-click easy.)
Everyone who uses the CSV export wants the data to end up in an Excel file anyway, so why not put it in that format to start with? (After all, it’s easy to go the other way as well, from Excel to CSV…)
We are delighted to introduce Planning Views, a very innovative, very unique way to view your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards! (Yes, it goes way beyond what simple calendar views, like those you might get from other tools, work :-))
Let’s start with your familiar view of a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, which we will start calling the Workflow View from now on:
Example of Workflow View
There’s now a simple drop-down that appears on the breadcrumbs, letting you switch to one of the Planning Views:
Selecting a View
Your new viewing choices include:
Next 3 days: this will show you everything that’s Due Today, Due Tomorrow, Due the Day After, and beyond
Next 3 weeks: everything that’s Due This Week, Due Next Week, Due the Following Week, and beyond.
Next 3 Months: everything that’s Due This Month, Due Next Month, Due the Following Month, and beyond.
Planning Views provide a date-oriented view of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: a Planning View takes your cards and rearranges into time-oriented columns.
Here’s an example of a Next 3 days view:
Example of 3-day View
Our Workflow view got neatly (and quickly!) pivoted to arrange all the cards in terms of when they are due:
All cards without any due date are shown first, in the Not Scheduled column.
Next, any Overdue cards are always shown in a special column by themselves, so they can be easily rescheduled.
Beyond this are columns for Today, Tomorrow and the Day After.
And finally, there is the And Beyond column, which summarizes all the cards that have due dates beyond the day after tomorrow.
Here’s the same board, but viewed in terms of the Next 3 weeks:
Example of 3-week View
Switching between these views is super-fast, and these views update in real-time: if a due date for any card is changed by anyone on your project team, no matter where they are located, this change is instantly reflected in your view.
The Next 3-months view is an even higher-level view of the board:
Example of 3-month View
All these views support smart drag-and-drop of cards: if you drag a card across, or up/down a column, the Due Date is automatically changed to reflect the new date. As you move the card, the new date is shown in orange so you know exactly what will happen next:
Smart drag and drop
Since your Planning Views aggregate cards that may be in different columns on your Workflow View, we made it really easy for you to see at a glance where each card is in terms of your workflow:
Where cards are in your Workflow view
Navigating forward and backward in time is also easy, as is jumping to “today’s view” if you have navigated too far into the future:
Navigating the Planning Views
As you navigate forwards or backwards, the “And Beyond” column magically adjusts to show you just what’s out of your current view!
Planning Views work just as well with Task Boards (if you are using Kanban) and Scrum Boards (if you are using Agile).
Check out Planning Views — it’s exactly the kind of great design and innovation that you have come to expect from Kerika…
A long time ago we used to have a feature we called the “Daily Digest” which sent an email everyday summarizing all the changes that had been done to your Whiteboard projects overnight.
(This was back before we added Scrum Boards and Task Boards as a feature, when all we had was our patented Whiteboards.)
We never got this feature to work properly: not because it was buggy in a technical sense, but because we could never figure out how to make it a useful feature.
After trying numerous times to tweak it we finally gave up a long time ago.
And promptly forgot all about it.
It turns out that the feature had only been turned off on our server software; it hadn’t actually been ripped out.
We stumbled upon it in an obscure corner of our vast code base recently and were surprised to find it still there, albeit in a “commented-out” form.
Well, it’s gone for good now. It never worked well, it had been turned off for years, and now it’s in the trash…
As you know, we offer a great integration with both Google Drive and Box, giving you the choice of using either of these cloud storage services when you sign up as a Kerika user.
For most people, the choice of whether to use Google or Box is often made by their employer, whose IT departments may have already developed a cloud strategy for their organization.
For a small number of people, particularly those in organizations that haven’t committed to a particular cloud strategy yet, they do have the choice of using either cloud service, or even both.
So, what happens if you have the same email address, e.g. someone@example.com, and you set up a Google ID and a Box ID that use this same address?
You could end up with two different Kerika accounts that use the same someone@example.com ID: that’s because each sign up, from Google and from Box, takes a different path into Kerika.
This is not a great situation to be in, and we certainly don’t recommend it, but the software does try to behave well when confronted with this situation.
If another Kerika user invites you to join her project team, the invitation will show up in both your Kerika+Google and your Kerika+Box account — and in your email, of course — but when you try to accept the invitation Kerika will check to make sure you are logged into the correct service.
Here’s an example: Jon, who uses Kerika+Google, invites Arun to join one of his projects. Arun happens to have both a Kerika+Google account, and a Kerika+Box account, but Jon doesn’t know that — and he shouldn’t have to care, either!
When Arun sees the invitation, he happens to be logged into his Kerika+Box account:
Invitation received on Kerika+Box account
But when he tries to accept the invitation, Kerika checks to see whether Arun and Jon are both using the same cloud service, and discovers that Arun is logged into his Kerika+Box account and not his Kerika+Google account:
Prompt to login to Kerika+Google account
So, Kerika works behind the scenes to help Arun sort out his two accounts.
Using Kerika with Safari in “Private” mode can result in some odd behavior, and that is entirely due to the way Safari works — it’s pretty much out of Kerika’s control 🙁
The underlying problem is that Safari doesn’t allow Web apps to use local storage (cache) when the browser is in “Private” mode.
Since Kerika relies upon local storage to provide a smooth, real-time effort, this can compromise the user experience if you use Safari in Private mode.
We have been one of the last jazzy Web apps out there that was still running on Internet Explorer 9, but that’s going to change: with our next release, due in a month or so, we will be asking Internet Explorer users to upgrade to IE10 or later.
The main reason for this change is that all “modern” browsers — and IE9 qualifies as “modern” only when it stands next to IE8 — do a lot of work within the browser itself that Kerika currently does: stuff like managing and manipulating the DOM structure of the Kerika application.
This means that the Kerika client-application — the bit that you actually see and use in a browser — is unnecessarily complicated, and somewhat slower, than it needs to be, because we are doing some work that IE10+, Chrome, Firefox and Safari all do within the browser itself.
Dropping support for IE9 will enable us to provide a faster user experience, with less complexity in the code.
Some of our Kerika+Box users have been complaining about the number of email notifications they get when new projects are created: this has to do with Box, rather than Kerika, but it’s helpful to understand what’s going on, and what you can do about it.
When you create a project in Kerika, Kerika creates a dedicated folder for the files that will be used in that project. This folder is shared with whoever needs access to that Kerika project.
Every Kerika user can set a personal preference: you can choose to share your new projects with your account team automatically when they are created, or just with people as and when you add them one by one to a Kerika project. By default, this is set to “share with account team” since this helps people discover new projects within their organization.
One downside of this: whenever you create a new project team, especially if it owned by a service account, a new Box folder will get created for this project and shared automatically with everyone who is part of that account.
This was resulting in way more emails than anyone wants to see, so we have made a change in the way we work with Box:
When people get added to a Box folder, through Kerika, they will no longer get an email notification.
However, the Account Owner will still be notified; there doesn’t seem to be any way around this.
And who are the “right people”? Well, anyone who is assigned to that card will get the chat sent as email, and Project Leaders can optionally get chat pushed to them as email as well. Everyone else can catch up with the chat when they visit their board.
When chat messages get pushed to you as email, you can reply to them just like regular email (all you need to do is a simply “Reply”, not a “Reply All”).
But, don’t go crazy with emoticons! Most smileys work OK, but not every emoticon will get encoded correctly (using UTF-8).
So, it’s natural to be happy when you are using Kerika, and it’s OK to smile while you work, but don’t use too many strange emoticons in your email replies!
🙂
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