All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

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

What we did in 2014

Technology

Here’s all the stuff we built in 2014, as far as we can remember…

January

February

  • We made it easier to delete projects you no longer need, and to retrieve them if you change your mind.
  • (We found out that one of our patents is referenced by Microsoft, IBM and Ford!)

March

April

We pondered integrating with Box. Pondered and pondered…

May

June

We got really serious about integrating with Box…

July

  • We reworked our website and this blog to use a responsive design, so it would be easier to read on mobile devices.
  • We were a big part of the IPMA conference in Lacey, Washington.
  • We released Kerika+Box!

August

September

October

October was a really busy month.

November

  • We made it easier for you to share projects with people who are part of your account team.
  • We presented at the Lean Transformation Conference in Tacoma, where we were a bit hit.
  • We presented at the Project Management Institute’s Olympia Chapter meeting.

December

  • We added Archiving as a feature for Projects and Templates.
  • We took Christmas Day off. Well, some of us did.
Verbeug
Verbeug

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.

 

Beth Albertson’s presentation on using Kerika at DSHS

Agile & Scrum, Government, ,

Beth Albertson, Solutions Architect at Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services, gave a presentation on November 18, 2014, at the Project Management Institute’s Olympia Chapter.

Beth Albertson
Beth Albertson

Beth talked about her own background in project management — how she started off as a chemist and researcher, and gradually found her way into project management and IT over the years — and how she used Kerika to transition from a classic “Waterfall” style of project management to something more Agile.

The presentation was very well received, and she has graciously agreed to share it with everyone :-)

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.

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.

This is what keeps us going…

Kerika, Technology,

Life in a startup isn’t easy: long hours, little pay, tons of risk, way too many challenges…

But every once in a while, our day brightens, like when we got this email from a user in Germany a few minutes ago:

Hello Team,

I almost can’t believe how fast you work… Great and Fast… My congratulations and a deep bow…

best wishes and regards

Karl-Heinz Kristen

Karl-Heinz, a Photographer and Artist, expressed his thanks with a great painting as well:

Deep Bow from a Kerika User
Deep Bow from a Kerika User

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 :-)

A quick refresh to Kerika, before we take a holiday break

Agile & Scrum, Technology, , , , , ,

We did a quick refresh to Kerika today, and we will be quiet for a while our development team — which is based in India — takes a well-earned Diwali break for about 2 weeks.

Today’s new refresh includes the following:

  • “Critical” has been added as a status flag for cards; you can also search for Critical cards with Advanced Search.

We will be back after the break with more great stuff rolling off the presses :-)

A new Welcome Experience for new users

Technology

Kerika is welcoming and friendly for people who are already familiar with online project boards, but what about people who have never used anything like Kerika before?

To make Kerika more welcoming for new users, we have created a new Welcome Experience: a series of simple callouts that can orient new users to the Kerika user interface, within 30 seconds.

We understand only too well that these kinds of callouts have been misused by many apps and websites, and that — when badly implemented — they can be annoying and ineffective, so we have take a good deal of care to design the Kerika Welcome Experience:

  • It is short. Seriously. We timed it so that it will take well only about 30 seconds of a user’s time.
  • It is personalized and relevant: it figures out whether someone just signed up fresh at our website, or whether that person joined after accepting an invitation to someone’s else project.

If you are a new user, let us know whether it worked!