When you are creating blocks of text on your Whiteboard canvases, we have a pretty nice selection of fonts you can use, from the serious to the playful.
A small tweak to the UI makes it easier for you to view this full selection, which we hope will encourage folks to personalize their canvases even more :-)
We used to have a feature where you could add a URL to a canvas or Whiteboard, and then choose to show that either as a regular bookmark, or as an embedded IFRAME.
We are dropping the embedded IFRAME feature, because most of the time it doesn’t work, and even when it does work, it’s not a great feature to have:
With our latest release we are adding a feature that will make it easier for folks to create, and maintain, very elaborate Whiteboards: any team member can lock a canvas to discourage other team members from making changes.
This isn’t a very complicated function; it has a very simple purpose: if you have been working hard on a particular canvas, which could be a stand-alone Whiteboard, part of a series of nested canvases in a Whiteboard, or attached to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, you may become worried that other team members might come by to visit your board and carelessly make changes to your pristine creation.
(After all, we creative types can get really possessive about our beautiful canvases :-)!)
To discourage others from making changes, just click on the lock button that appears to the far end of the Canvas toolbar:
For Team Members, this is a “soft lock”: any canvas that’s locked by one Team Member can be unlocked by any other Team Member, so you are not really shutting out people from making changes, merely discouraging them by signalling that you would like to preserve a canvas in a particular way.
But for Project Leaders, this is a “hard lock”: if a Project Leader locks a canvas, it can be unlocked only by another Project Leader. (Remember: projects can have more than one Project Leader!)
So, if a canvas gets to a truly pristine state that you want to preserver forever, have the Project Leader lock it, and the rest of the team will be able to view it but not make changes.
And, of course, if canvases are embedded (nested) inside each other, each canvas can be locked or unlocked, as you like, giving you maximum flexibility.
When you have expanded your view of a Kerika board to fill up the browser, using the “Max View” button on the top-right corner of the Kerika app
Another button appears on the top-right, to help you quickly switch between all your open project tabs, as well as get to your Home Page:
This button is color coded to help you understand, at a glance, what’s going on in all your open projects:
Clicking on the button shows a list of all your open projects, along with your Home Page:
The little green arrow (shown above at the top) points to the currently open tab, the one that you are viewing right now.
Projects have a blue icon; templates have a purple icon: in the example above, Statewide Tennis Shoe Distribution is a template, while all the others are projects.
You can reorganize your list of open tabs by simply dragging them up or down this list.
(But, the Home Page is always on the top; that can’t be moved.)
You can also close an open project tab that you are no longer interested in by clicking on the “X” to the right edge of the entry.
So, there’s a simple visual consistency in Kerika’s design:
We finally got around to adding a feature to the Canvas that we have wanted for a while, but somehow never got around to building: now, with a single click, you can change a shape on a canvas, whether it is in a Whiteboard project or attached to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board:
Here’s why you might need this: often when you are first creating a process flow diagram, you might use shapes — rectangles, ellipses, diamonds — in an arbitrary or careless way, which is just fine because at that time you are trying to be creative rather than meticulous.
But, as the canvas takes shape and matures, you might want to go back and standard the use of particular shapes (even if you don’t strictly follow the old conventions for drawing flowcharts, which we don’t either).
This new function makes it easy for you to select a bunch of shapes and change them all to a new shape. Previously, you had to create a new shape and put it in place to replace the old shape, which was pretty inconvenient when you had a bunch of nested canvases and a bunch of curved lines connecting all the shapes.
Easy, now.
We have updated the toolbar for canvases to provide a better user experience for folks working on standalone Whiteboards or when attaching canvases to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards.
What used to look like this:
Now looks look this:
When a shape, e.g. a rectangle is selected, you used to see something like this:
Now, you will see this:
When you select an image that’s on your canvas, your toolbar used to look like this:
Now, it looks like this:
This is a major improvement: the toolbar is not only less cluttered, but all the functions are more explicit and easier to access and understand, especially:
DESIGN STANDARDS
For the buttons we are mainly using icons from Google’s Material Design standards because that was already in line with our styling, although in some cases we thought Google’s designs were too “blah” and went for something a little punchier.
BACKSTORY
We haven’t updated the Canvas features in a while — we had been concentrating on improving the Kanban and Scrum aspects of Kerika — but lately some of our users have been telling us about the amazing collaborative spaces they have built using Kerika (check out the folks working on the Ebola challenge at OpenIDEO) and this inspired us to try to improve the Canvas!
Other very cool users include the folks at the Foundation for Common Good, who are working on a variety of social good projects, and the teachers at the Iowa Mennonite School who have been using Kerika for art projects and other learning activities.
We have made a small layout change to the Project Info dialog to make it easier to read: now the summary data on cards and dates are organized in a bullet list instead of being laid out as a sentence:
This isn’t a big deal, of course, so why are we bothering to blog about it?
Well, for one thing it shows our obsession with details, which is probably a good thing — right? And, for another, it highlights the influence of one of our favorite researchers on Web usability: Jakob Nielsen who has consistently emphasized that on the Web people scan text, not actually read.
All hail the master!
We have been working on some designs and ideas for a “Dashboard” feature in Kerika for many months now. Actually, a couple of years now.
Along the way we convinced ourselves many times that we had solved the problem in an ideal way.
At other times, we convinced ourselves that there was no way to solve a particular aspect of the problem, so our obviously ugly solution was the best possible solution.
Looking back on all these iterations, it’s very humbling to think about how easy it is to think something is perfect, until something better comes along — at which point the old thing is suddenly, unbearably ugly.
In other words, the ugliness of each design is obvious, in retrospect.
So everything we are proud of today: we will be ashamed of in a couple of years…
When you add files to your Kerika+Box projects, either as attachments to cards on Task Boards or Scrum Boards, or on canvases and Whiteboards, these get stored in your Box account.
If you have a premium (enterprise) version of Box, you can directly download these attachments, instead of having to go through Box’s preview display first: just hover over an attached file, and you will see a “download” button appear:
This works fine for enterprise users of Box, but if you are using the free version of Box, you will see a Box error page, like this:
We are starting to realize that a card’s status, e.g. “Ready for Review,” “Needs rework,” etc. is pretty important not just in terms of what they show about a card’s current state, but also in terms of its history.
Previously, we weren’t tracking changes to a card’s status as part of the card’s history; without our latest release, that’s now a feature, so if you are wondering who put a card “On Hold”, you can just open the card’s History and Kerika will tell you:
