When you are writing a chat message, on a card or canvas on any Kerika Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard, what happens if you need to leave that message in the middle and go look at something else in Kerika?
For example, suppose you are in the middle of writing a chat message, but in order to complete it, you need to go off and look at another card’s details, or maybe a file attached somewhere else on the board?
You can leave aside a chat in mid-stream, go somewhere else in Kerika, return to the chat, and pick up where you left off!
That’s because Kerika uses your browser’s local cache storage to keep your unsent message: it means your changes aren’t lost while you go look at something else in Kerika.
This is a handy usability fix we have always had in Kerika, but it may be one that folks didn’t realize existed…
We used to refer to “Projects” and “Boards” somewhat interchangeably on our website, our blog and in the Kerika app itself.
There was no special reason for this: in our mind, a Project was clearly a Board, and vice-versa, and it never occurred to us that this might prove a source of confusion to anyone.
Well, we were wrong about that.
In the real world, people are very cautious about “starting a new project”, because this might involve getting formal administrative approval, budget allocation, staff changes, etc.
In other words, in the real world a “project” is a big deal.
Unlike so many other collaboration tools that make it difficult for you to create as many boards as you like, Kerika was always designed to make it very easy for you to redesign your work as needed: start new boards, move cards or canvases from one board to another (using Cut, Copy and Paste), and to move ideas and content from one context to another.
Many of our competitors don’t offer this kind of flexibility: either the software makes it hard, or their billing model actively discourages you from creating multiple boards.
That will never be the case with Kerika: we will always support flexibility in how you organize and manage your boards.
Still, our interchangeable use of “projects” and “boards” was definitely causing some confusion, which we have fixed with our latest release by using the term “Board” consistently and avoiding use of the term “Project”.
So, if you were a Project Leader previously, you are now a Board Admin on that board. Your rights and privileges remain the same, it’s just your title that changed.
Board Admin
When you start a new board, what used to be called “New Project” is now labeled “New Board” to make it clear what you are doing:
We have added a new feature that should prove handy for a lot of folks: you can now add content — files from your laptop, images from your mobile or tablet, Web links from your Intranet or the Internet, or canvases — to a Task Board or Scrum Board itself.
If this sounds like something that was always there, maybe we need to say that differently: you used to have the ability to add content to a card, now you can add it to the board itself.
There are many situations we have encountered where we want to share content or a canvas with a team, but there wasn’t any obvious place to still it — no single card on the board that seemed like the right place to attach that content.
And that’s because the content we wanted to add was applicable across the entire board, not just relevant to a single card.
This was getting frustrating, so we decided to scratch our itch: a new button on the top-right area of your Kerika app will let you add files, Web links and canvases to the board itself:
Board Attachments
This should make some of you as happy as it has made us!
Did you know that you can embed a Google Map in your Kerika Whiteboards? It’s easy: just copy the Google Map’s URL:
Adding a Google Map to Canvas
And paste it into the dialog box that appears when you click on the “Add Web Content” button on your canvas toolbar:
Add Web Content
Kerika automatically figures out the URL refers to a Google Map, and shows you an embedded map on your canvas:
Example of embedded Google Map
You can do the same thing with card attachments, for your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: Kerika shows a small thumbnail of the map in the list of attachments on your card:
As part of our work on combining tags and colors, we have been cleaning up parts of the Kerika user interface that had minor inconsistencies.
One such inconsistency — in our view — was that you were able to add people to a project team from within the card details dialog itself:
Adding people to a team
This button has been there in Kerika for a very long time, but it doesn’t really make sense to have this capability within the card details dialog: it just isn’t the best place to decide to add someone to a project team.
Instead, in our new layout the Project Settings dialog consolidates all the board management in one place, including adding people to a team, changing someone’s role within a team, and removing someone from a team:
It used to be that when you added content to a card — files from your laptop or Web content from your Intranet or the Internet, or a canvas — the newest content was added at the top of the list.
Of course, you could always rearrange them, by grabbing and dragging them up or down the list, but this it not a feature that many users discovered on their own :-(
Rearranging attachments on a card
Well, for greater consistency with how the chat and history are shown within a card’s details, we are now going to show attachments in chronological order as well — the latest files and URLs that you added to a card will appear at the bottom of the list, and the view of these will be automatically scrolled to show the latest items:
With our latest update, it’s become easy to keep track of sub-tasks for cards on a Task Board or Scrum Board; here’s an example:
Using strikethroughs to keep track of sub-tasks
In the example shown above, the second item in the numbered list has been been taken care of, and so it has been struck-through, making it clear to the rest of the team that it isn’t an issue any more.
We have added the capability of marking text within card details with a strike-through, and this, combined with the easy way in which you can create numbered lists, makes it easy to track sub-tasks!
At the time we added “In Progress” as a new status value, we also removed the “Done” status, mostly because the drop-down list of status choices was becoming rather long — and “Done” was not quite like all the other choices that we were presenting for marking a card’s status.
This is what the old choices looked like:
Old status values
And this is what the new status choices look like:
New icons for status settings
There are two small UI tweaks here that we made:
A purple color is now used for “Needs review” — this previously was green, but green was really the best choice for “In Progress”, and we didn’t want to use the same color for two different states.
The icon for “Critical” has been changed to look like a fire: that’s because we want to reuse the old triangle icon in the future for a great new feature that we are still brainstorming — a way to mark certain cards as “troubled”.
Building a great user experience is rarely the result of big, bold actions: more often it is the cumulative gain of a large number of very small tweaks we make to our user interface design.
Here’s an example: the right-click menu, when you click on a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, used to look like this…
Old right click menu
This menu is a little crowded, and one irritating source of errors was that people would sometimes click on one of the Move choices (Move to Done, Move to Trash or Move to Backlog) when they intended to do click on one of the others choices instead.
The irritation came from the fact that these Move operations had a much bigger impact than the others: for example, if you accidentally cut a card, you can reverse that operation by selecting the cut cards once more, which would effectively “undo” the cut.
But, if you move a card to Trash or Backlog, it was a lot more hassle to get it back: you had to make sure the Trash or Backlog was currently being displayed — and in many large boards these columns are routinely hidden from view by the user — and then find and drag that card back to where it was.
So, here’s our small UI tweak to reduce the chances of this error:
Right-click menu has new styling
A simple visual cue, in the form of grey horizontal separator lines, helps remind the user that some of these right-click mouse operations are “more significant” than others, by creating a visual segregation of these options from others.
A simple UI tweak that helps reduce errors by our users, and one that adds up to a great user experience!
