All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

Kerika is the only task management tool that's designed specially for global, remote teams.

Expanding our use of Lazy Loading

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, , , ,

Our introduction of lazy loading, as part of our recent redesign, was originally limited to just three columns: Backlog (for Scrum Boards), Done, and Trash.

We figured that these columns were most likely to be very long, and would therefore benefit the most from implementing lazy loading.

This worked well; so well, in fact, that we have expanded our use of lazy loading to work with all columns, across all Task Boards and Scrum Boards.

The practical effect of this should be to reduce the time needed by the browser to load large boards, for all users, on all kinds of computers.

Enjoy.

Tasks within Cards

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

We have added a new feature to our Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can now manage a list of tasks for each card on a board, like this:

Example of tasks in a card
Example of tasks in a card

Every card can have as many tasks as you like, organized in a simple, smart checklist.

Individual tasks can be assigned (to one person at a time) and scheduled, and Kerika is smart about rolling up these assignments and due dates to reflect them on the card as well:

Managing tasks in a card
Managing tasks in a card

As you mark off tasks as Done, they slide to the bottom of the list to make it easy to see what remains to be done.

 

An easier way to hide or show columns

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

We are extending the Column Actions menu (featured in a previous post) to provide a quicker, easier way to hide (or show) individual columns on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards:

Option to hide column
Option to hide column

When a column is hidden, it’s name is shown vertically, so you can easily remember which columns you have hidden at this time.

Hidden columns
Hidden columns

Revealing columns that are hidden is easy: just click on the “eye” button and the column immediately comes back into view.

Every Team Member can decide whether to show or hide individual columns: their choices won’t affect the way other Team Members choose to view the same board.

Customer Journey Maps: a new template

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, ,

We have a new process template that you can use to create Customer Journey Maps, based upon some great articles written by the Nielsen Norman Group.

Customer Journey Map
Customer Journey Map

This template contains all the step you need to create your own Customer Journey Map, along with links to articles on the subject from the Nielsen Norman Group.

It’s part of our “Creative Stuff” category of process templates, which includes the Google Design Sprints as well.

The design effort behind our new version

Kerika, Technology, Usability

For our extensive redesign of Kerika we used the Sketch design app for the first time, transitioning way from our earlier use of Adobe’s Creative Suite.

Here’s our design effort, by the numbers:

  • We created a total of 937 individual screen layouts, all of which were high-resolution and pixel-perfect.
  • Each screen was designed for 1680×1050 pixels, which is the resolution of a 21″ desktop monitor although each design was subsequently tested on a 1400×800 laptop screen as well.
  • Every element on every screen was laid out to its precise final size and spacing, to create a photo-realistic view of the design.
  • We exclusively used vector graphics so we could scale our views for different devices and resolutions without any loss of resolution.
  • Every screen was mocked using real data, rather than lorem ipsum-style fake text, so we could get a more realistic idea of how much space actual cards, columns, etc. would take.
  • We used realistic storylines for all scenarios: user personas were developed and used consistently, so that, for example, the same person appeared as Board Admin on all screens.
  • Every interaction between different features was considered simultaneously, so that we could guard against edge cases where the design might clash or fail when multiple user conditions were true at the same time.

Here’s an example of a screen mockup:

Inviting someone
Inviting someone

Here’s the same screen design, with dimensions marked as redlines:

Inviting someone (Markup)
Inviting someone (Markup)

Extensive use of symbols (repeating objects in Sketch) helped us ensure that we had consistency across all 937 designs, simultaneously.

We exported our icons using the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, rather than PNG or JPEG, to ensure there was no loss of resolution when we used these icons in the Kerika app.

Over 1.5 years, we went through 35 complete iterations of the design, where nearly all 937 screens were changed as we explored different concepts.

And, no, we aren’t done yet…

Preferences

New options for the 6AM Task Summary Email from Kerika

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

Welcome to 2017! We have a big bunch of goodies lined up for release in the coming weeks and months, and we are going to start off with some nice improvements to the 6AM Task Summary email that you can (optionally) get from Kerika:

You now have two options: you can get all your overdue and due items sorted by date, or by board. Or both.

To turn this on, go to https://kerika.com/preferences, and check these boxes:

Preferences
Preferences

We have also improved the “group items by date”: instead of showing what’s due today and tomorrow, this email now includes What’s Due This Week and What’s Due Next Week.

“This Week” is adjusted automatically as the week progresses to keep track of what’s left for the current week, which always ends on Sunday.

Enjoy.

Bug, fixed: Apparently 40 characters wasn’t enough for a name

Bug Fixes, Technology, Usability

Unexpected bug we encountered recently: an attempt to sign up as a Kerika user, using our direct sign up process, failed.

When we looked into the error logged on our server, we discovered that this user was trying to enter a first+last name combination that came to 42 characters; our code assumed that no name would exceed 40 characters in length.

Digging a little further into the user scenario, we discovered that these were accounts that were being opened in the name of organizations, or departments within an organization, rather than actual people.

So while 40 characters may have been enough for most “real people” names, it wasn’t enough for department names, e.g. something like “Kerika Marketing Communications Team”.

Live and learn.

Learning to live with email sandboxing

Technology, Usability

We spent hours recently trying to understand why a particular user wasn’t able to join her coworkers boards, before finally figuring out that it was her company’s “email sandboxing” that was messing up Kerika’s invitation flow

The problem was a real nuisance to debug, and we fear it will affect more of our users in the future so we are going to make a change to our invitation process to make sure it continues to work well for everyone.

Some background:

“Email sandboxing” refers to a process that tries to trap malicious URLs that are included in emails.  While the exact implementation varies by security vendor, the basic process is the same: use a virtual machine as a sandbox, and click on every URL contained within an email.

This can trap a lot of malware emails.  If the URLs are designed to be single-use only, i.e. the URL is unique and intended to be clicked upon just once, the sandbox will “explode” the mine before the user gets to it.

More sophisticated implementations of sandboxing will handle multi-use URLs by watching for return traffic from the sender’s machine, which would indicate (potential) attempts to download malicious software onto the recipient’s computer.

The problem with sandboxing:

The sandboxing approach takes the same brute force approach to all links, in all emails, without trying to understand the context of the email itself.

One consequence may be that “Unsubscribe” links contained in newsletters are clicked on automatically by the email sandbox virtual machine, so the recipient gets just one copy of a newsletter that she signed up for.

To get around this, systems that generate emails automatically, like a newsletter, have to move from a one-click unsubscribe (which would be more user-friendly) to a two-step unsubscribe process (which is more annoying to the user.)

You will have seen the two-step unsubscribe process more and more often in your own newsletters and other mass mailings: you click on the “Unsubscribe” link in a newsletter, and you land on a web page where you are asked to, once again, confirm that you want to unsubscribe.

The user might think this is a last-ditch attempt by the newsletter publisher to hold on to their readers, but it might actually be an attempt to safeguard the newsletter’s subscribers from their own brute force security implementations!

How this affected Kerika:

When you invite someone to join your Kerika board, as a Team Member, Board Admin or Visitor, the invitation gets sent to them by email as well from within the Kerika app.  The emailed invitation looks like this example:

Example of invitation email

Example of invitation email

The email contains two links: the most prominent is the Accept Invitation, but there’s also the Reject Invitation.

Email sandboxing plays havoc with this sort of email invitation: there is an equal possibility that a particular sandbox will click on the Reject Invitation link before it clicks on the Accept Invitation link, which leads to a completely random experience for users who are being invited by the coworkers to join Kerika boards, since Kerika lets you act just once upon an invitation: once you accept it, or reject it, you can’t act upon it a second time.

How we discovered this problem:

One of our users, based in California ,was trying — repeatedly and unsuccessfully — to invite another user, based in Taiwan, to join one of her boards, and the process kept failing.

And for the longest time we couldn’t figure out why!

Our debugging seemed to suggest Kerika itself was somehow auto-rejecting invitations on the user’s behalf, which had us really worried about a serious bug in the server before one of our developers got the idea that perhaps the problem was with the user’s email system, and not Kerika.

When he examined the headers on an email we got from the affected user, he found references like these:

Received: from mail1.bemta12.messagelabs.com (mail1.bemta12.messagelabs.com [216.82.251.10])

A little more sleuthing led us to Symantec’s “threat protection” service, which is one of the common email sandboxing systems out there.

How we are fixing this:

We are moving to a two-step process for people who want to reject invitations that come to them by email: clicking on the Reject Invitation will now take you to a Web page where you will be asked to confirm that you want to reject the invitation.

It’s one more step for users, and not the kind of superb user experience we aim for, but without this there’s no way for us to make sure that the best intentions of security vendors don’t end up crippling our own business!