Tag Archives: Usability

About software usability in general.

How long things stay in the Clipboard

Technology, Usability, , ,

When you copy or cut an item on a Kerika board — a set of cards, or may be some things sitting on a Canvas — these objects are placed in a special Clipboard that sits on the Kerika server, not in your browser.

This is important to note for several reasons:

  • Because the Clipboard is on the server, you won’t lose the items if your network connection breaks before you have a chance to paste whatever you cut.
  • The Clipboard will hold on to the items for 20 minutes, to give you time to think about where you want to put them. (And, to recover from any network problems you may have experienced.)
  • If you don’t paste something that you had previously cut, the Clipboard “releases” it back to where it was originally, after waiting 20 minutes to go by while you ponder. But, if you are impatient, you can reverse your cut action sooner simply by clicking on the cut items, which continue to appear in a faded (greyed-out) appearance on your board.
  • Because the Clipboard is on the Kerika Server, other team members won’t see the change until you actually do the paste. So, for example, if you have cut some cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board and haven’t pasted them yet, your project team members will continue to see the items on the old board until you complete the paste.
  • And, finally, here’s a great feature, thanks to the Server Clipboard: one of your team members can be making changes to a card while you are in the process of cutting-and-pasting it, and those changes aren’t lost. That’s because the object is stored on the server rather than your browser, making it possible for your team members to make changes even as you are in the process of doing a cut-and-paste.

Exporting just a subset of a Task Board or Scrum Board

Agile & Scrum, Technology, Usability, , , , ,

A tiny change in labeling in our latest version will, we hope, make it clear that Kerika’s Export feature is actually pretty smart about managing the amount of data that you export from a board:

Exporting subset of board
Exporting subset of board

What used to say “Export cards” now says “Export the cards shown”.

“Cards shown” means just what it says: if you are hiding some columns from view, or filtering your view of the board to show just those cards that match particular colors or tags, then only the cards currently shown are going to be exported.

This makes it really easy for you to manage what information goes into an export: if you don’t want the Backlog of a Scrum Board to be included, for example, just hide the Backlog from view before clicking on the Export button.

Cards that are in Done or Trash are frozen

Agile & Scrum, Usability, , , , , ,

Cards in the Done or Trash column, of a Task Board or Scrum Board, cannot be modified without first moving them out of Done or Trash: this is different from how boards worked before, and we made this change as part of our recent update where we introduced the concept of Archives.

Done cards
Done cards

There are a couple of reasons why we did this:

  • It seems like common-sense: if you have deleted a card, or marked it as Done, why would you be making changes to it? If the card needs changes, or someone wants to do chat or any other updates, that card isn’t really deleted or done, is it?
  • It matches the behavior of Archived Projects: when you move a project into the Archive in your account, that project is frozen in its current state, and remains frozen while it is in the Archive.For symmetry and ease of understanding of the concepts of “Done” and “Archive”, it made sense that Done cards should also be frozen.

 

When Projects Get Done: Archive Them

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

Here’s another new feature with our latest update: when a project is done, you can drag it to the Archive column on your Home page.

Archiving Projects
Archiving Projects

Archiving a project freezes it: no one can make any changes to it while it is in the Archive, so if you change your mind and want to make some changes to an archived project, you need to drag it back out of the Archive and into your Projects column.

All the documents attached to an Archived Project are frozen: the goal here is to preserve the final/completed state of a project and all its assets, so that later on if you need to investigate a problem — or deal with a FOIA request or some other legal disclosure requirement — you can do so with confidence.

All dates, status, chat and teams are also frozen: if someone was part of an Archived Project’s team at the time the project was moved to the Archive, they will continue to show up on that project team.

If a task had a due date and hadn’t yet been completed (i.e. the card hadn’t yet been moved to the Done column), that due date stays intact.

If the project was a Scrum Board, it will continue to stay attached to the Backlog it was using at the time the board got archived: when you view an archived Scrum Board, it will show that Backlog in it’s current state.  This makes it easy to archive Scrum Boards that represent different Sprints that work off the same shared Backlog!

You can change your mind: If you need to work again on a previously archived project, just drag it out of the Archive column and drop it into the Projects column on your Home Page, and that will “un-archive” (restore) your project.

You can create templates from archived projects: if you drag an archived project and drop it into the Templates column on your Home Page, that will create a template based upon that project, while leaving the project in your Archive.

Our latest update: a minor facelift…

Technology, Usability

Our latest update to the Kerika software features a bunch of bug fixes and other improvements that are mostly under the covers, as several user interface tweaks to help improve usability.

One change you will notice right away is that when you open a card, the details dialog box has new tabs for Tags and History: this was done to make it easier for people to find these functions, which were previously tucked away within the tab for the card’s description.

Card Details
Card Details

The History tab is all the way at the bottom now, where it’s easily accessible but not in the way — since History is not a frequently used function.

There are other UI tweaks: icons have been modernized and the overall look is cleaner, and the Trash column of a board now shows you when each card was deleted.

Sorting cards in a column just got easier

Technology, Usability,

You used to be able to sort all the cards in a column by Due Date, now you can also sort them by person and by status!

Sort By
Sort By

This makes it even easier than before to manage large boards:

Sorting By Status organizes cards as follows:

  • Critical
  • Is Blocked
  • Needs Review
  • Needs Rework
  • Ready to Pull
  • Hold

This makes it easy to organize your day: all the most important stuff, e.g. the cards that are Critical or Blocked, come to the top of the column where they are not likely to be overlooked.

Sort by Person organizes cards so that you can see all the items that are assigned to individuals: all the cards assigned to Arun, for example, will show up together within the column.

And where cards are assigned to several people, a simple alphabetical sort is applied on the names.

You still have Sort by Date: Kerika is smart about showing you only those sorting options that are relevant to your situation, and if a particular column doesn’t have any Due Dates, this sort option is not shown.

We just made it easier for you to manage very large boards 🙂

Emails and notifications in Kerika

Technology, Usability,

Kerika always sends emails to users in two scenarios:

  • Someone assigns a card to you. The system waits 2 minutes, to ensure that the person who made the change doesn’t change her mind, and then sends you an email that an item has been assigned to you.

    We figured that if someone expects you to do a piece of work, it would be good to know that sooner rather than later.

  • Someone chats on a card assigned to you. Any Team Member can write a message on any card, regardless of whether they are assigned that card or not.

    If someone chats on a card that you own right now, an email gets pushed to you (again, after a 2-minute wait.) We figured that if someone has something to say about a work item that you are responsible for, you would want to know that sooner or later.

Kerika optionally sends emails to users in a bunch of other scenarios, all of which are determined by your user preferences (which you can set at https://kerika.com/preferences).

  • If someone chats on the board itself (as distinct from chatting on an individual card), you can get this sent to you as email.
  • If there are cards assigned to you that have due dates, at 6AM you can get an email that lists everything that is overdue, due today, or due tomorrow.

    If you are a Project Leader on any board, this email includes all cards on those boards that are overdue, due today, or due tomorrow, regardless of whether they are assigned to you or not. (We figured that as a Project Leader you would care about overdue items even if you weren’t personally responsible for them.)

  • If new cards are added to a board where you are a Project Leader, you can get notification emails if you want to keep track of all new work items.
  • If cards are moved to Done on a board where you are a Project Leader, you can get notification emails if you want to keep track of completed work.
  • If a card is reassigned from one person to another on a board where you a Project Leader, you can get notification emails if you want to keep track of how work is being handed off from one person to another.

So that’s emailed notifications in Kerika: just two types of emails are always sent, and they relate only to cards that you are personally responsible for; all the other emails are optional and can be turned on/off as you like.

What happens if people make changes to cards while you weren’t looking? (If you were looking at the board, you would see the changes in real-time, but even then, with a very crowded board, you might not notice that a card has changed in some way.)

Kerika uses the orange color as a way to alert you of changes. You can learn more about this on our website, but the basic concept is simple: Kerika highlights, in orange, any card that has changed in any way since you last looked at it, and by “look at it” we mean that you opened up the card and looked at the specific details that changed.

For example, if someone adds new files to a card, the attachments icon (the small paper-clip) appears in orange. After you open the card and look at the list of attachments, the orange highlight disappears.

These orange highlights are very smart about making sure you know exactly what changed on a board; they even let you find changes that are outside your immediate visibility: e.g. changes on cards that are way down below the scrolled view of the board, or changes in columns that you have chosen to hide.

Changing passwords got a little easier

Usability, ,

Since we use OAuth 2.0 to let people sign up (and sign-in) using their Box or Google IDs, Kerika never actually sees any user’s password.

But, a lot of our users don’t quite understand how OAuth works, and they expect that when they go to the My Account screen in Kerika, they should be able to change their password right there.

Well, we aren’t going to move away from OAuth because we believe that’s a far more secure arrangement than having Kerika manage your password, but with our new release we are making it easier for people to figure out where they should go to change their passwords:

Change Password
Change Password

If you go to your Kerika account (http://kerika.com/my-account) and click on the Change Password button, it will take you to either Box or Google website where you can change your password.

A small “feature”, but one which we know will help smooth the way for at least some of our users 🙂