A new tutorial video, showing you how Kerika’s Chat combines the best of instant messaging and email, and lets you have very focused conversations on your Task Boards, Scrum Boards and Whiteboards:
Category Archives: Technology
Using animation to provide a “sense of place”
Animation often gets a bad reputation, and often this reputation is well deserved because too many designers and developers use animation gratuitously: just because they can, or just because they want to show off their technical skills.
At Kerika we have been very cautious about using animation, and have generally restricted its use to scenarios where it can help give users a “sense of place”: providing transitions from one display to another, so that a user has a sense of having journeyed from one part of the system to another.
Animations are particular useful when returning to where you come from: an effective animation can help users understand that they have returned from their journey.
Using animation to unfold drop-down dialogs helps the user understand that the dialogs are literally unfurling on top of the Task Board or Scrum Board: in other words, the user isn’t going anywhere different, just unfolding another display for temporary use.
With our latest version, we added some more animation: now, when you open a card on your Task Board or Scrum Board, it will appear to literally open in front of your eyes.
Animation is also used when you close a card: it appears to collapse in front of you in a way that draws your eye to its position within a crowded column.
This kind of animation, we believe, is useful rather than gratuitous: it helps the user understand what is happening when she opens or closes a card.
(We may consider some other touches of animation where we think it could help provide useful transitions, but we have to be mindful of the performance hit of animations as well…)
An improvement to Card History
Every card, on every Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, contains within it a full history: a log of all the changes that have been made to it.
(A few actions are ignored because they can occur so often, and are often inconsequential, e.g. moving a card up/down within the same column. In contrast, moving a card across columns is considered consequential, and is therefore logged in the card history.)
We recently made a usability improvement in the way the Card History appears: the log of changes is now shown in chronological order, rather than reverse chronological as was the case before.
This makes history look more like chat, and should make it more usable!
Easier to tell who moved a card to your board’s Trash
When a Team Member deletes a card, it just gets moved to the board’s Trash; it doesn’t get immediately deleted from Kerika’s database even though it disappears from your view right away.
That’s because the “delete” action in Kerika is really a “move to Trash” action: you are removing something from view, but not necessarily getting rid of it for good.
Any Team Member can delete a card, but only a Project Leader can completely and permanently get rid of it — in other words, “taking out the trash” is one of the privileges reserved for Project Leaders (and Account Owners).
The Trash column is normally not shown on your Task Board or Scrum Board, but you can bring it view easily by clicking on the Filter button:
With our latest version, it’s easy to see who moved the card to the Trash: we show this right on the card itself.
“In Progress”: a new Kerika feature
We are adding “In Progress” as a new status tag for cards, on Task Boards and Scrum Boards, that we think will make it easier for everyone to see which items are actually moving along.
Couple of reasons why we did this:
- People get assigned too many cards sometimes, even when they are working with a “Pull” model (as opposed to “Push”), sometimes even using Work-in-Progress (WIP) Limits don’t solve the problem of easily seeing exactly what’s being worked on at any time.
- It allows for greater flexibility in designing process templates: like in this example, for a process for hiring and onboarding new employees:
In this process template, we have three buckets of activities: Background Check, IT & Facilities Setup, and Onboarding, and we have a separate In Progress column that you could use to indicate which card is currently in progress.
But, with a “In Progress” status indicator on cards, you wouldn’t need that extra column: you could work on cards from any of those three buckets and indicate their status right there. And when the work gets completed, these cards can go straight to Done!
Using Search in Kerika: a new tutorial video
We have an updated tutorial video on how real-time Search works in Kerika, across all your projects and templates:
Filtering by People: a new feature
When you are working with a large board and a large team, it’s often useful to see just those cards that are assigned to some people.
For example, you might want to just see those cards that are assigned to you, so that you can focus on getting your stuff done and not get distracted by everything else that’s going on.
With our newest release of Kerika, we have made this both possible and easy.
One quick menu choice, within our new Filter dialog, will make it possible for you to filter your view of a Task Board or Scrum Board to just see the items assigned to you:
If you are a Project Leader, you might want to filter your view of a board even further, and Kerika makes that easy:
This view is particularly handy if you are trying to deal with staffing issues: for example, if one person has called in sick, you can first filter your view to show just the items assigned to that person, and then add more cards to your view to see how busy someone else on the team is, if you are thinking of offloading the sick person’s work to someone else.
Using Custom Workflows in Kerika
A new tutorial video that shows you how you can customize the layout of any Task Board and Scrum Board, and — more importantly — switch any board from being a Task Board to being a Scrum Board, or back.
Only Kerika lets you have several Backlogs within the same Account, and easily pull cards from different Backlogs into the same Scrum Board if you want to combine work items from several Backlogs into the same Sprint.
Colors+Tags: a much better way to organize large boards
We have had both tags and color coding of cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards for a very long time, but, unfortunately, these operated independently of each other.
There’s no good reason for them to have been separate aspects of working with cards other than simple history: we added color coding many months after we added tags.
Originally we expected color coding to be used in a limited way only: to highlight a few cards on a crowded board that needed special attention.
We had a limited set of 7 light pastels that were chosen to be “color-safe”, i.e. appropriate for use by color-blind people.
Over time, however, we found that people were using color coding a lot more than we had anticipated, and that in fact they were using colors as an alternative to regular tags.
And that was true for the Kerika team as well: we have a “bug” tag that we use to track all work related to defects, but some of us also like to use the red color to highlight cards related to bugs.
And while we could readily agree on the symbolic meaning of a few colors, e.g. Red as indicating something critical or broken, we couldn’t agree on the names or meanings of all the colors.
So, this obviously wasn’t a sustainable path for us: if colors and labels were simply alternative ways of managing your view of a large board, and for collating work across multiple boards, then clearly colors and tags needed to come together as a single concept.
And that’s what we have done with our latest release: colors and tags are now the same thing — all colors have names, all tags can have colors.
Here’s what your Kerika boards will look like, with the new way of showing tags:
A couple of points to note:
- All your old tags are preserved with this change, so you don’t have to go back and fiddle with any of your old boards.
- We will show more than one tag on a card at a time; this will make it easier to visually scan a large board.
The dialog for managing your board’s tags has also been updated, to reflect the new merger of tags and colors:
When you add a new tag, you have to use a different label from the ones you are currently using: as before, duplicate tags are not allowed.
And the same goes for colors: when you add a new tag, you can’t use a color that is already associated with a label, which means tags have unique colors.
One unique benefit we have added, along with this merger of tags and colors, is the ability to merge tags together.
Let’s say you had been using a tag called “bug” (if you are working on a software project). Some of your colleagues have been using a different tag called “defect”.
You decide that these two tags really reflect the same underlying concept — they are both being used to highlight problems with your software project — so it makes sense to merge these two tags together.
There used to be no easy way of doing this in the past, but now there is:
- You can merge tags by renaming one of them, e.g. renaming “bug” to “defect” will cause the system the ask if you want to merge “bug” and “defect” together to be same tag.
- You can also merge tags by recoloring on of them, e.g. by changing the color of the “bug” tag to be the same color as the “defect” tag will cause the system to ask if you want to merge these two tags.
We hope you like these changes :-)
Using Filters with your Task Boards and Scrum Boards
A new tutorial video that shows you how Kerika’s powerful Filter feature lets you customize your view of any Task Board or Scrum Board: just see those cards that are assigned to you, or create more custom views of a board by selecting cards based upon their status, tags, or the people assigned to work on them.
You can even hide entire columns on the board if you like :-)