In the recently added Highlights feature, we let you create your own custom highlights:
We fixed a problem where “This Week”, “Next Week”, etc. wasn’t including Overdue Tasks and cards, which could give users a somewhat misleading impression of what they needed to get done in a particular week or month.
After all, if something is already overdue, you will need to get that done this week along with anything that’s scheduled for this week!
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
When a column is hidden, it’s name is shown vertically, so you can easily remember which columns you have hidden at this time.
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.
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.
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.
Keith Vernon and Kaz Obrietan, talking about Kerika made an impact upon their professional services firm, over the past two years:
Kerika’s integration with the Box Platform: a customer’s perspective on how sweet it is…
Kerika with the Box Platform: a Customer’s Perspective from Arun Kumar on Vimeo.
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:
Here’s an example of a screen mockup:
Here’s the same screen design, with dimensions marked as redlines:
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…
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:
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.
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.