Expand length of Custom fields display in Task Pane details

I really like Asana, which is why most of the time I haven’t chimed in when other users have complained about one change or another. It’s an excellent product. But the new display length of custom fields is too short. We initially tried Trello for customer case management. Just before implementing that, Trello destroyed that plan by making custom fields so short that no meaningful name could be written or read for any of them. That’s where Asana won out - and switching to Asana came with many other advantages. Now, after we’ve spent months creating and tweaking a couple of dozen ongoing Projects, many of which have the maximum of 20 custom fields (and we wish more were allowed), and tweaking the field names to make them fit well in the small spaces and still be meaningful, Asana has now made its own custom field name display areas shorter, causing many of them to be partially unreadable without the user hovering over them. Similar fields for different purposes in different projects need enough space to write a wording that differentiates them in some way. So they can’t be made shorter without harming Asana’s ease of use. I am unlikely to be as happy with Asana as I was until the previous display lengths are restored.

HI @JCB and thank you for sharing your feedback with us!

Just in case you are not aware of, it is possible to expand the columns width. Please, have a look at my colleague’s post to learn how.

I hope this helps @JCB! Have a great Monday!

Thanks, Natalia, but it appears I wasn’t specific enough in my original post. I’m referring to the width of the custom field name display in the task details view, where custom field names appear one above another within the one task. So I’m referring to the change in width that has occurred only in the last few days.

Than you so much for the clarification @JCB and apologies for the confusion! I didn’t realise you were referring to the new task pane design.

I’m moving back your post to the #productfeedback category to allow other user to upvote it. I’ve slightly edited the name to make it more discoverable. I hope it’s OK.

Thanks again for sharing your feedback with us and have a lovely day!

I can’t waste any more time waiting around to see if anything’s going to happen about this. I’ll just have to make the decision now to go through our dozens of custom fields and change or abbreviate many of their wordings in the hope of finding some way to make them readable and meaningful in the task pane. That may work well enough, but it’s likely that it won’t. Asana, I’d appreciate it if you could refrain from messing up our work flow and wasting hours of our time in the future - especially if it’s going to be without warning.

It’s my day off today, and so far I’ve spent most of my day re-writing custom field names in an attempt to fix the problem Asana has created with this change. It’s 4.10pm and I still have plenty of work left to do on this task.

I finished at 5.45pm. What a great way to have to spend my day off just so we can read our custom field names properly. Some of the new names had to be ridiculously abbreviated, and have extra notes added to the “Add description” area just so staff can understand what they are. I’m not impressed, Asana.