We just updated Kerika today, and along with the usual bug fixes and other behind-the-scenes stuff we have made an improvement to the way Views are shown on your Home Page:
Improved Views in Kerika
Some of our users have dozens of boards in active use at the same time, with large (and sometimes overlapping) teams, and as a result their Views counts are nearly always high.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the Home page now shows two counts for each View:
The total number of items that match for that View, and
The number of items that match that are assigned to you.
This makes it easier to see if you need to go back to a View to catch up on something that’s directly related to you, i.e. is assigned to you.
And yet another tutorial video, part of our ongoing effort to create a bunch of learning materials for new users! This one is about getting a lot done, which means using Kerika for large scale projects.
Kerika’s Highlights feature help you zoom in on what really matters, even when you are working on a Task Board or Scrum Board board with hundreds of cards.
And Kerika’s Views feature helps you stay on top of things no matter how many projects you have underway at any time.
Here’s a quick tutorial video on how to get the most out of Kerika’s Highlights and Views:
We found and fixed a bug that reported incorrect counts for some Views (on the Home page), that was triggered when users did a particular sequence of opening a View, applying the Assigned to Me toggle, and then returning to the Home page.
It was an edge case that took us a while to figure out because our own team didn’t see the problem happen; it only affected a few users.
Views on Home Page
The counts shown on your Home Page, under the Views tab, should be correct now.
Views are unique to Kerika: no other work management system provides such an easy way to see what matters, across all the boards you are working on.
These Views make it easy for organizations to really scale up their use of Kerika across multiple projects and many ongoing projects at the same time.
We have now added a very useful new View: What’s New and Updated. As you might guess from the name, this View lets you catch up on everything that’s new and changed, across all the boards you are working on — as a Board Admin, Team Member or Visitor.
What’s New and Updated (click for a larger image)
This View can work very effectively as a Dashboard for managers who need to keep track of many different boards, all working at the same time: instead of constantly revisiting each board one-by-one, this View is a simple, comprehensive way to see everything that’s changing across all your boards.
The updates are shown in Kerika’s unique “heads-up” notification style: the blue New tags highlight cards that have been newly added to your boards (that you haven’t opened yet), and the orange highlights show you precisely what’s changed on your old cards.
The new and changed cards are sorted into columns, with each column containing all the new and changed items within a particular board. The newest changes appear at the top of a column, and if a board has nothing new to report, the corresponding column is not shown (so your View doesn’t get cluttered up.)
(Cards that are moved to the Done or Trash columns on a board are not included in the View, to help avoid getting the View cluttered.)
As with all Views, it’s easy to operate on all the cards within a column, by selecting the Column Actions button that appears on the top of each column:
View options
The Mark All Cards As Read action is useful if you want to ignore everything that’s going on in a particular board, e.g. when you have just returned from a status meeting where you got fully briefed on what’s happening on a particular board.
Another way to temporarily ignore individual boards is to Hide Column: this collapses the column from the View, and let’s you focus more intently on the handful of boards you care most about.
Selecting a card in this View lets you open the card within the View itself, or to open it on the board where the card actually sits:
View card
(Sometimes it’s easy to deal with cards just by themselves; sometimes the View Board action is more helpful, if you want to be sure you understand the full context in which a card changed.)
Using your mouse’s right-click action will also bring up a bunch of useful actions for that card:
Mouse actions
In addition to all the other actions you can perform on cards, you also have the option to get the URL (address) of card using the Get Link action. Every cards, every canvas and every board in Kerika has a unique address, and using these URLs anywhere on a board, e.g. in the board’s details or chat, will automatically set up a link between the two cards.
When you mark a card as “read” on this View, it remains on the View until you click on the Refresh button (shown at the top-right corner of the View).
And, as with all Views in Kerika, the What’s New and Updated View includes the “For Me” toggle button on the top-right corner: clicking this will quickly filter the View to show you just those items that are personally assigned to you.
For Me toggle (click for larger image)
This feature is available to all our users, just like every other feature in Kerika: it doesn’t matter whether you are still in your 30-day free trial, you are working on the free Individual Plan, or are benefiting from Kerika’s free Academic and Nonprofits Accounts. Everyone always get the same Kerika goodies :-)
We have improved our Views feature to include a simple toggle that lets you filter the entire View to show just those items that are assigned to you.
This new toggle appears on the top-right corner of the View, and we have added a Tip to help you understand the function:
What Needs Attention without filtering
Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:
What’s Due with filtering
All the other items are hidden from the View, and a simple count at the bottom of each column shows you how many items are assigned to others. In the example shown above, 1 item is assigned to someone else, and is due today.
It’s a simple, fast feature that we think shows the best of Kerika’s design approach :-)
This feature has been added to all of our Views that need this:
For some time now we have offered the ability for you to hide entire columns on a Task Board or Scrum Board; we are now extending that to Views as well:
Hidden column in Views
In the example shown above, several columns are hidden in this What Needs Attention view, and Kerika shows a count of how many items are hidden in each column.
This feature is available through the Column Actions button that’s at the top of each column:
Hide column option for Views
This can help you focus in on specific work items that need more attention than others.
We fixed a bug recently that affected the Views feature: when a board was moved from one account (owner) to another, it wasn’t getting included properly in the Views for the new owner.
With our latest version, a task within a card (on a Task Board or Scrum Board) can now be assigned to multiple people, just like the card itself.
This makes it easier to handle more complex work items that contain a large number of tasks, each of which may require more than one person to handle.
To make this work, we have also updated the What’s Assigned to Me and What’s Due Views to make sure everyone who is assigned to a task, where tasks have multiple people responsible for them, sees this clearly.
As one of our users pointed out, Kerika’s Views — What’s Assigned to Me, What Got Done, etc. — shouldn’t include any cards from templates, just regular boards.
People who use templates on a regular basis often pre-assign cards in the template: for example, an employee on-boarding template that involves HR tasks may be preassigned to a specific HR employee.
Our initial implementation of Views included cards from Templates as well, which led to a misleading impression of the amount of work, particularly unscheduled work, that was waiting for a particular person.
That’s fixed now: Views will automatically exclude cards from Templates.
At long last, we have built Views — one of the most commonly requested features, and something that we had been obsessively designing and redesigning over years, trying to figure out the best way to handle this need.
We have done it now. Views has been built, and is automatically available across all your Task Boards and Scrum Boards, whether they are owned by you or shared with you.
We are starting off with four standard Views, and we will built more in the future, and add a way for you to build your own Views as well.
The Views we have built are:
What’s Assigned To Me
The most commonly asked for feature by people who are working on several projects — and, hence, several boards — at the same time. This is what it looks like:
What’s Assigned To Me
Everything that’s currently assigned to, on all boards except for those that are in the Trash or Archive, are collected for you into a single View, where cards are organized as follows:
Not Scheduled
Overdue
Due Today
Due This Week (excluding what’s already included in Due Today)
Due Next Week
Due This Month (excluding what’s already included in Due Today and Due This Week)
Due This Quarter
Due Next Quarter
It is a comprehensive summary of everything you need to get done, and it will be invaluable for managers and anyone else who has to work on multiple projects at the same time.
If you select a card in a View, like this
Selecting card from a View
You get quick access to key actions:
Move to Done
Move to Trash
View Board
Open
Open opens the card right there, inside the View itself. View Board, on the other hand, opens the card in the board in which it is located.
Both are useful, depending upon the card and what you want to do: in some cases you just need to update a particular card — e.g. reschedule it, add a comment or file — and opening the card in the View itself, which is very fast, is enough.
In other situations you might want to be sure you are understanding the context of the card, and it is better to see where it is on the board that contains it. This can be helpful for cards that you are not quite sure about.
What’s Due
This View will be particularly helpful to managers (Board Admins): it summarizes everything that’s due, on all boards where you are one of the Board Admins:
What’s Due
This basically brings to life everything that you can also (optionally) get in your 6AM Task Summary email.
Cards are organized for you as follows:
Overdue
Due Today
Due This Week (excluding what’s already shown as Due Today)
Due Next Week
Due This Month
Due Next Month
For this View, as with the What’s Assigned to Me View, we try to be smart about not showing duplicate cards: if something is due today, for example, it will show up in the Due Today column, but not get duplicated in the Due This Week or Due This Month column.
This makes it easier for you to plan your schedule: you can see what needs to get right away, and what needs to get done later.
What Needs Attention
Again, a View that will be of particular interest to managers concerned with several ongoing boards:
What Needs Attention
Here, Kerika tries to show everything that needs a little extra attention: things that are
Overdue
Flagged as Critical
Flagged as Blocked
Flagged as Needs Review
Flagged as Needs Rework
Flagged as being On Hold
These items typically represent your risk profile across all your boards, and Kerika brings it all together in a single View.
What Got Done
Great for anyone who needs to produce a status report, or any manager who needs to monitor progress across many different projects:
What Got Done
Across all boards where you are a Board Admin, this View summarizes
What got done Today
What got done This Week (excluding items shown in This Week)
What got done Last Week
What got done This Month (again, excluding items shown for Today and This Week)
What got done Last Month
What got done This Quarter
Accessing Views:
All your Views can be accessed from a new tab called Views (naturally) on your Home Page:
All your Views
On each View card, Kerika shows how many items are included in that View, and as of when. The Views are automatically refreshed when you open them, but in-between they are not updated because we do not expect the information shown to change on a second-by-second basis.
If you are worried that your View is out of date, you can update it by selecting it on your Home Page:
Refreshing a View
You can also update any View that you currently have open, by clicking on the Refresh button shown on the top-right of the View:
Refreshing a View
We will let you go crazy with these Views, for now. In the future we will add more (we already have some ideas on that front, but would love to hear from you as well!) and also add a Custom View capability.
