Ability to Click on task title to open task details.

So this new design is doing my head in. Am I right that now to open a task I have to race my mouse from left to right of my screen to the little black word ‘details’ to see what’s actually inside a task??

My flaming work is task and sub-task based so this is costing me loads of time. back in the old days (last week) I could see what was in a task without any of these hijinks.

Does anyone feel the same? Is there some new workaround to fix this issue?

While it’s true that you can no longer click on the task’s title to open the details, you don’t only have to click on the word “Details;” you can click anywhere just to the right of the text when hovering causing that word to appear.

Once the detail pane is open though, you can actually click anywhere on the task, including title, to see details for other tasks.

As to a workaround, perhaps consider the shortcut if you haven’t already; you can use Tab+Enter as a toggle to open/close the detail pane. (And Esc also closes the pane as well.)

Hope that helps,

Larry

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Welcome to the Forum @Adam and thank you for taking time to share your feedback with us!

I have slightly edited the title of this thread to better reflect your feedback and to make it more discoverable to other users to upvote it. I hope it’s Ok.

With the new list view clicking on a task name now immediately makes the name editable. How often do people rename tasks? You know what I do much more often? Click the name to get to the details page. Please unbreak this. You took something intuitive and replaced it with something unintuitive.

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@Chris_Koboldt, you’ve raised a very good point.

You took something intuitive and replaced it with something unintuitive.

Click the name to go to the details page would be ideal. Maybe double click could be used to edit the name.

@lpb what do you think? Can you get this fixed? While you can click on the blank space to open the task, the details word throws it off. My workplace is finding this design change highly annoying.

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@Adam, I’m just an Asana Certified Pro consultant, not an Asana employee, so I can only lobby for a change like you. I see your concern, and @Chris_Koboldt’s, and agree there’s merit, but it must be considered with many other details. For example: I actually appreciate that there’s now a way to click on task rows without the detail pane flying open each time; that’s just one additional consideration.

Larry

This is a suggestion for better UX in the spreadsheet view.

Expected behavior: First click on a task name will allow me to edit text, press Return to insert new task, etc.
Actual behavior: The text field for task names in the new list view doesn’t fill the whole the entire “cell,” so the first click only selects the task—it doesn’t put your text cursor inside the field. Unless I click exactly on the text, I need to press Return or Spacebar to place a text cursor and begin editing the name.

Maybe this is desired behavior for other people, but it doesn’t match the experience of the old list view, where you could click anywhere in a line and begin editing. To me it’s a papercut.

Hi @Philip_Neves and thanks for your feedback,

we already have a thread on this topic, so I’ve merged your post with the existing thread to gather all feedback on this topic in one place, hope that’s ok!

A related issue—

When the task detail pane on the right is closed, it’s no longer possible to use TAB-A (assign to) and TAB-D (set a date) on a task and just start typing, as you could before. When you use either of those shortcuts, you still have to hit or click in order to proceed. And in fact, even after you’ve brought focus to the date cell, you STILL can’t start typing. You have to use your mouse to select a date.

Along with this thread’s original problem, it makes for multiple changes that slow down my work process. Difficult to understand why Asana would do that.

@lpb Larry this is not true for Sub Tasks. Clicking on the blank space next to the name of the Sub Task still forces you into an edit the subtask mode instead of opening the details. The details window is much harder to get to - right at the very end of the sub-task row by clicking on a tiny comment icon.

The keyboard shortcuts are not really a workaround when the workflow is Task > Sub-Task > Sub Task Details in an intuitive way. You can open the task with a keyboard shortcut, but will have to click on the sub-task row with your mouse, then switch to your keyboard to use Tab + →

This will be much easier if clicking on the task name opens up the details, and clicking on the sub-task name opens up the details of the sub-task.

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@Paul6, I’d say your post is about subtasks within the task details pane whereas my post you’re replying to, and the rest of this thread, is about tasks within the tasks pane, so @Natalia, should it be moved to another thread?

Thanks,

Larry

In some other Work Management Apps I’ve used, the “open” item is on the left, near the title.

This is how it’s set up in Coda:

Untitled 2

What about if you guys simply moved that “details” over to that part of the List View? There is a bit of “screen real estate” that could handle the icon, in my view…

Hope that’s useful!

I agree. Coming back to Asana after using a different project manager for a few years and this is driving me nuts.

I use the Stylus chrome/firefox extension to modify the css on this page because it drives me nuts. below is the css I added for Asana. it removes some of the little icons and also highlights safe clickable space, and makes the title non-editable

.SpreadsheetGridTaskNameCell-detailsButtonClickArea {
    border-radius: 3px;
    background-color: #ebfeb4;
}

.SpreadsheetGridTaskNameCell-detailsButtonClickArea > .AbstractThemeableRectangularButton--isEnabled, .SpreadsheetGridTaskNameCell-hearts {
    display: none;
}

.TaskMoveIndicator {
    display: none;
}

.SpreadsheetTaskName--editable  {
    pointer-events: none;
    cursor: pointer;
}

.SpreadsheetTaskName-shadow:hover {
    pointer-events: none;
}

.SpreadsheetGridTaskNameCell:hover .SpreadsheetTaskName--editable:not(.SpreadsheetTaskName--childFocused) {
    border: none;
    background-color: inherit;
}
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