Category Archives: Technology

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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

Google authentication is burping, again.

Technology

If you use Kerika+Google — the version of Kerika that integrates with Google — you may be experiencing some login problems this morning. In fact, you may have experienced some problems over the past few days.

We are continuing to investigate this, and so far the problems seem to be on Google’s end, and they also seem to be mostly affecting people who have premium Google Apps, e.g. Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Nonprofits.

Update: it’s not just premium Google Apps; it’s affecting all sorts of users.

Google authentication is burping
Google authentication is burping

Fortunately, we have not seen any problems with Kerika+Box: Box’s authentication service has been running fine so far.

Some users have written in asking if they can switch to Kerika+Box and still preserve their old data. This is possible, but requires some manual work on the user’s part, and if the problem persists we will put up a blog post explaining how users can do this.

In the meantime, please bear with us, while we bear with Google…

Writing Status Reports: an interesting use-case for Export

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, , , ,

Ben Vaught from the Washington State Office of the CIO has come up an interesting use-case for Kerika’s new export feature that we hadn’t considered: use it to write your weekly status reports!

Kerika lets you export cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board in CSV or HTML format: the CSV format is useful for putting data from Kerika into another software tool, like Excel, but the HTML format is designed for human consumption.

Here’s an example of a card that’s been exported as HTML:

Example of HTML export
Example of HTML export

By using the Workflow button (on the top-right menu bar), you can adjust your display to show just the Done column on a board, and then further use the Tags button to limit the number of cards that are shown in this column.

For example, you could display just the Done column, and filter the cards to show just the ones that were assigned to you.

Do an HTML export of this, and you will be able to easily cut-and-paste the output into a Word document or email, and submit your status report!

When Worlds Collide: Distributed Lean and Agile Teams in the Public Sector

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, Team Collaboration, Technology, , , , ,

We were thrilled to be part of the Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington week at the Tacoma Convention Center. Over 2,700 people attended — a sellout crowd!

Attendees at Lean Transformation
Attendees at Lean Transformation

Arun Kumar, founder & CEO of Kerika, gave a presentation on both days on Distributed Lean and Agile Teams in the Public Sector, drawing upon lessons learned, case studies and best practices from multiple state agencies and private sector firms.

Here’s the presentation:

Google Apps is having one of those days

Technology

Google’s Authentication service, which all users of Kerika+Google rely upon to sign up and sign in, has been having intermittent problems all day.

Fortunately, they have been reporting this on their Apps Status Dashboard, which they don’t always do, so perhaps the outages are more widespread than normal?

Here’s the picture as of 12PM Pacific Time:

Google Apps Dashboard
Google Apps Dashboard

We saw a ton of authentication errors from Google this morning: some were because domain policy checks were failing (this affects users of premium Google Apps for Business), some because Google’s servers were timing out with a “504” error.

We have tried to identify all the affected users and reach out to them to explain the situation and reassure them their Kerika data are unaffected.

As of this writing the situation seems to be actually improving a little for the Kerika community: we are seeing fewer errors, and clearly people are able to login to Kerika+Google, although the Google Dashboard is contradicting us by reporting a worsening situation…

Stay brave.

Revisiting the (deserted) Post-It Palace

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Technology, Usability, , , , ,

A couple of weeks ago we visited a UX team at the Washington State Department of Licensing, and took a photo of the “Post-It Palace” they had built within their cubicles:

Post-It Palace
Post-It Palace

2 weeks later, this is what we saw:

Revisiting the Post-It Palace
Revisiting the Post-It Palace

Everything is now inside a set of Kanban Boards powered by Kerika+Box!

All done
All done

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!