All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

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

Another week, another update: this time, it’s mostly styling (and better user management)

Kerika, Technology, Usability

We are trying to get back to a faster rhythm of releases. Our goal is to have releases within 3 weeks: we want to complete our development and QA within 2 weeks, and then use the third week for “dogfooding” the software.

(As you might expect, we are fervent users of Kerika! Everything related to our business is done using Kerika project boards, and to make sure we are putting out the best possible product, we use a daily build of the software on a test server. This keeps us firmly on the bleeding edge of our own software development: it means that we get to try out our software in a real-life scenario — one that is absolutely mission-critical for the company! — before we pass it on to our users.)

Our newest version, released today, contains a number of under-the-hood fixes that will help us manage our growing number of users. And, we are happy to report, our users are indeed growing: we are adding new users in March at twice the rate we did in February!

From your perspective, it’s mostly some styling and minor user interface changes that will be visible. We have a better way to expose the Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete functions for cards, having heard from too many users that they couldn’t easily figure out how to delete projects, we have more uniform use of colors, and there is a right-click menu for dealing with project cards as well as task cards.

The more uniform use of colors is a step towards a larger update/refresh of our look-and-feel. We have been hearing from users that our user interface is “too grey”, and we are working on that issue. We are also looking at improved notifications, both onscreen and through emails. Stay tuned!

Our new version: even better integration with Google Drive, and even better tablet support

Technology, Usability

Our next release is mostly about improving our Google Drive integration: we are making it a lot easier for you to manage your Google Docs from within Kerika itself, so that your content has a very useful “contextual layer” on top! Here are some of the improvements we be rolling out this weekend:

  • The file organization inside your Google Drive will be a lot more streamlined: a single, top-level folder called “Kerika.com” will have subfolders for each account to which you have access.
  • Better synching between Google Drive and your Kerika projects:
    • If you rename a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, that new name will show up in your Google Drive as well.
    • If you rename a file in Google Drive, that new name will show up in your Kerika cards.
    • If you delete a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, that file will get moved to the Trash in your Google Drive as well.
    • File sharing within your Google Drive will be done at the Kerika project folder level, which means faster performance and a cleaner interface.
    • Duplication of file folders will be eliminated.
  • Content that is attached to cards can be renamed easily: if you rename a file that you attached to a card, this new name will show up in your Google Drive as well, and you will be able to easily rename Web links as well.

We are also improving the Kerika experience on iPads and cellphones: as before, you can access Kerika right from the Safari browser (or Chrome, if you prefer), without having to download any special apps, and we are adding:

  • Better support for “double-tapping”, similar to doing a double click on a desktop.
  • Better support for phones.
  • Improved performance.

General improvements to the user interface will include:

  • A new set of tutorial videos, all under 2 minutes in length, to help you get more out of Kerika.
  • Cut-and-paste of entire projects.
  • Any URLs that are referenced inside cards or on chat messages will appear as clickable links.
  • Content inside chat messages can be easily copied.
  • A cleaner way to customize the workflow for your project.
  • A cleaner layout of icons on cards.
  • Some cool animation effects that make it easier to understand how canvases work, particularly if your projects contain multi-layered canvases (where one canvas contains several others).
  • A new to mark cards as “Needs rework”.

And, a final note: this version has taken quite a bit longer (4+ weeks) that our previous versions, largely because we allowed “feature creep” to happen… We kept adding usability tweaks to the release, particularly with respect to the iPad experience, and that chewed up a whole week. We need to guard more closely against feature creep for our next release.

Coming up: we are adding tagging as a new feature, which will make it easier to create quick filtered views of large projects!

What works for small businesses: LinkedIn, not Twitter

Kerika

A great article from the Wall Street Journal on which social media channels have the most potential to help small businesses: a survey they did resulted in just 3% picking Twitter as the most effective tool.

41% picked LinkedIn, 16% picked YouTube, and 14% picked Facebook. Google+ came in at 7%.

What works for small businesses when it comes to social media
What works for small businesses when it comes to social media

This matches our own sense for what works, and doesn’t, although the 7% that Google+ grabbed seems surprisingly high. Is this because of the increasingly tight integration that Google is enforcing between their search engine results and your usage of Google+? We haven’t seen any benefits at all from our Google+ efforts, and remain frustrated that we still don’t have a custom URL like plus.google.com/kerika…

 

A new Weekly Prioritization template, inspired by Jim Collins’s work

Kerika

Jim Collins, acclaimed author of Build to Last and other well-received books, wrote an interesting blog post about 10 years ago on the importance of creating a Stop Doing list.

Mr. Collins emphasized the importance of deciding not to continue doing something any longer as key to successful prioritization:

A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.

He cited the example of Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark making the critical decision to sell off the company’s paper-mills, which provided the bulk of the company’s revenues and had been in existence for 100 years (!), in order to focus on the new consumer business of paper towels.

This article has inspired us to create a new task board template called “Weekly Prioritization”: it lets you organize your work in a different way from the traditional “To Do / In Progress / Done” taxonomy of Kanban, by using columns organized as:

  • Must Do: in here, put everything that absolutely must get done that week.
  • Should Do: everything that you would really like to get done, once you get all the “must do’s” done.
  • Could Do: stuff you could do, if you had any time left
  • Stop Doing: this is the really critical column — identify everything that you should stop doing!

Let us know how useful this proves to you! (Hat tip to Eitan Nguyen for the suggestion…)

And, as usual, we will continue building new process templates to help our disparate users with their projects.

Coming up: a simpler pricing for Kerika

Kerika

We are moving to a simpler pricing scheme for Kerika:

  • As before, you can start with a free Standard Account, which will let you have two other people work on your projects.
  • Once your team grows past that point, you can upgrade to a Professional Account, which we are offering at a simple rate of $10 per user, per month (billed annually).
  • Academic & Nonprofit users can still request free service, which will now allow for up to 10 free users per account.

Three key changes with our new pricing:

  • You won’t have to buy “packs of licenses” any more: you can buy just as many as you need.
  • The new rate is higher, but reflects the tremendous increase in functionality since our November release of task boards, Kanban boards and Scrum boards.
  • The refund policy is simpler: instead of changing the subscription end-date, you will simply get a refund for the unused portion of any Professional subscription that you had purchased.

Our new pricing will continue to be very competitive, with tremendous value for your money because:

  • There are no limits on the number of projects you can create within an account.
  • There are no limits on the number of cards that you add to a particular project board.
  • There are no limits on the files that you share as part of a card (the size of your Google Drive is entirely between you and Google.)

All of our competitors are offering very complicated pricing schemes that limit your freedom to create and reconfigure projects as needed. But not us.

And, as before, we will continue to use Google Checkout for our billing, which means we will never see or store your credit card information.

Improved integration with Google Drive, faster performance, and full iPad support

Usability

Along with our best wishes for this holiday season, we have a small present to put under the tree as well: a new version of Kerika will be available on Christmas Day! This new version will come with:

  • Improved integration with Google Drive: now, you will be able share any kind of files, including music, videos, Flash, and other binary data, simply by adding them to your project cards or canvases. (When you log into Kerika again, you will be asked to reauthorize Kerika’s access to your Google Apps,)
  • Improved performance: projects should load at least twice as fast as they did before, making it a lot easier to use Kerika in coffee shops and other places with unreliable WiFi.
  • Full, fun iPad support: you will be able to access your Kerika projects using the Safari or Chrome browser on your tablet (no need to download any apps).
  • Better support for visitors: you can give project stakeholders (like your clients, for example) read-only access to your projects. They will be able to view everything in your projects except for your chat, which will remain private to the team members.

There are also usability tweaks:

  • Attachments can now be opened with a single click.
  • The “Move” action can now be found in the menu at the top of the columns.

What we are working on next:

  • A consolidated view of all your projects, similar in concept to the “unified inbox” you find on your smartphone.
  • Easier ways to manage your account, and integration with the Google Apps Marketplace and the Chrome Web Store.
  • Work estimation, work logging, and exporting of project data.

Thanks again for all your support: the very encouraging feedback we have been getting from our users continues to fuel our efforts!

Giving real thanks, this Thanksgiving

Kerika, Technology, Usability

This Thanksgiving holiday, we have good cause to be grateful to all the folks who gave us detailed feedback on our new task management software, and helped us identify about 25 different improvements that we plan to make over the next week covering areas such as:

  • Eliminating any confusion that might exist regarding project privacy;
  • Making it easier to edit card titles;
  • Making it easier to chat on individual cards;
  • Improving the emails that are sent when people are added or removed from projects;
  • Improving the overall performance, by at least by 50%;
  • Simplifying the experience for new users;
  • Simplifying the use of canvases and whiteboards;
  • Adding helpful hints throughout the product; and
  • Eliminating references to “Kanban” which some people find confusing (without eliminating any functionality).

We will be updating Kerika next week, and will continue to release new versions every two weeks, and over the next month we plan to market and publicize the software more.

Kerika isn’t written in Indonesian. (And Google Docs isn’t in Vietnamese either…)

Ephemera, Technology, Usability

An odd problem that we cannot quite figure out: every once in a while Google’s Chrome browser will tell the user that the application is written in Indonesian, and then offer to do a translation.

We cannot figure out what’s going on with this: all of the code is written in Javascript and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), so why would Chrome consider it to be an Indonesian page?

The problem must lie with Google Chrome itself: now, we are noticing that it will sometimes report that Google Docs is written in Vietnamese, as this screenshot shows!