All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

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

A simpler menu for cards and columns on your Task Boards and Scrum Boards

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

We used to have separate button, and associated menus, for actions related to cards and for actions related to columns:

Separate card and column actions
Separate card and column actions

This reflected the history of the Kerika product: we first designed and built the card actions, and much later added the column actions.

In retrospect, however, we concluded that separating these into two separate menus was not a good idea: it was confusing for our users to remember which menu supported which action. (Even the Kerika team, which uses Kerika for everything that the company does, was having trouble remembering the differences between the two buttons and menus.)

We have fixed that usability problem with our latest release: a single button is shown, and the popup menu that appears includes both card actions and column actions:

Combined Card and Column Actions Menu
Combined Card and Column Actions Menu

Clicking on the Sort and Move actions brings up all the sorting and moving options you have; the Sort menu now has a much richer set of actions:

Sort options
Sort options

We have also done some small tweaks to the sorting action: Sort by Status now puts the On Hold cards at the bottom of the column, below all the ones flagged as Normal.

Wrestling with SSL certificates

Kerika, Tutorials,

We had previously been using SSL certificates for our website (kerika.com) and this blog (which is on a subdomain: blog.kerika.com) that we got from GoDaddy, but we have moved away from them.

What pushed us away was their aggressive approach to billing customers: they automatically renewed our SSL certificates after just 9 months into a 12-month contract, which we found unacceptable.  Talking to their customer service people was an unhappy experience as well, so we decided to not do any more business with GoDaddy.

Now we are using a SSL from Amazon for our website and app (kerika.com): Amazon actually provides free SSL certificates to sites hosted on Amazon Web Services, and it was easy and simple to set up.

However, AWS doesn’t provide wildcard SSL certificates so we couldn’t handle our blog as well — particularly as our blog isn’t hosted at AWS. Instead we got a SSL certificate for the blog from RapidSSL which is reasonably priced.

So far, so good.

A style refresh for our Blog

Kerika,

Hope you like it — we finally got around to customizing the WordPress TwentyThirteen theme we have been using for this blog.

Nothing fancy; just making sure the colors and font (especially the fonts!) are consistent with our website and app.  We use Roboto everywhere now: we find this to be a really easy to read font for most screens, and think that Google did a great job in coming up to an alternative to the traditional Arial/Helvetica.

We are also trying to clean up the Categories and Tags we use to help you find older blogs: there were too many overlapping categories/tags that had accumulated over the years so we got rid of a bunch of them.

Let us know what you think…

We made it easier to have more complicated tasks inside cards

Agile & Scrum, Usability, , , ,

When we first added the ability for you to add a list of tasks to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, our expectation was that these tasks would be short and to the point: maybe just a few words long.

And to make the display of tasks neat and tidy inside a card’s details view, we truncated long tasks to show just two lines worth.  We figured this was a reasonable restriction that would make the layout look better, and wouldn’t actually inconvenience anyone since we really didn’t expect people to create very complex tasks, that might take more than one sentence to spell out.

Well, that turned out to be a bad assumption: the tasks feature turned out to be far more popular than we expected, and we soon started getting complaints from people that didn’t like seeing their tasks get truncated to two lines.

We have fixed that with our latest update to Kerika: now, all tasks will show fully, no matter how long they are. Here’s an example:

Example of long task
Example of long task

In the example shown above, the first task is long enough to spill out over three lines, and all three lines are shown.

So, there you go: tasks became a little more flexible!

We are moving away from monthly billing

Kerika

We used to offer monthly and annual subscriptions, and in the last 5 years we had just two customers ever request the monthly option.

Everyone else found the annual subscriptions far more convenient so they wouldn’t have to process invoices or receipts, or get internal purchase approvals, every month.

The monthly purchase offer wasn’t very good for Kerika either: there’s a certain amount of bookkeeping and overhead for processing every invoice and given the already low $7 price per user, this offer was essentially a money-losing proposition.

So, we are now discontinuing the monthly subscription purchases altogether.  We are asking all our customers to purchase annual subscriptions: the amounts involved are still very reasonable, and if you do change your mind in the middle of the year, you can still request a refund for the unused portion of your annual subscription.

This means you don’t have an risk of overbuying: if you change your mind about using Kerika, you can get a refund for the remaining portion of your subscription.

Bug, fixed: downloading the latest version of a document, for direct sign up users

Bug Fixes, Technology, ,

Thanks to our users at Oxbow Farm, we have found and fixed a bug that affected users who signed up directly with Kerika: clicking on an attachment in the card details was downloading the original version of a file, not the latest.

Here’s what was happening: when you add a file to a card or canvas, Kerika checks to see if that file was already being used on that particular card or canvas.  If so, Kerika automatically handles your latest upload as providing a new version of the old file, so you see just one entry in your card attachments view:

The bug that we recently discovered, and fixed, resulted in Kerika downloading the original version of the file when you used the download option that appears after you select an attachment from the list of attachments on a card.

If you clicked on the attachment’s thumbnail to open a preview of the file, Kerika was correctly opening the latest version of the file. The bug was only in the download action, and that’s been taken care of now.

Our youngest Kerika users do amazing stuff

Academic & Nonprofit, Kerika

For the past few years Stéphane Vassort from College La Grange Du Bois in Savigny-le-Temple in France has been using Kerika with his middle-school students who have been building 3-wheel trikes as part of their science curriculum.

He recently shared this heartwarming video of his students — surely among the youngest Kerika users in the world! — with the trikes they have built:

https://youtu.be/2ChNIUaxqW4

We are so happy to be supporting this kind of work!  If you are interested in getting a free Academic & Nonprofit Account like Stéphane, please let us know.

Managing multiple Due Dates became easier

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

We have made it easier for teams to manage multiple Due Dates within the same project, especially when a single work item (as represented by a Task Board or Scrum Board card) contains many different sub-tasks, each of which could have a different Due Date.

Where a card has multiple tasks, each with different Due Dates, the range of dates is shown on cards to make it easier to understand the “time footprint” of the work item as a whole.

Here’s an example of a card with two open/remaining tasks, one of which is due today and the other tomorrow:

Tasks with different due dates
Tasks with different due dates

When viewed on a Task Board or Scrum Board, Kerika will show the range of dates involved for this card:

Tasks with a range of Due Dates
Tasks with a range of Due Dates

This provides better context, better usability for users who work with due dates: at a glance you can see the overall “time footprint” of a work item that involves several sub-tasks.

The What’s Assigned to Me and What’s Due Views are now smarter about handling multiple due dates for the same card: if just one task within a card is overdue, even though the card as a whole isn’t yet overdue, this is shown in the Overdue column in these Views.

Your 6AM summary email (which you can turn on optionally) now lists the due dates on individual tasks within cards, as these become overdue or due this week or next week.