šŸ© Inconsistency with donut charts (in dashboards)

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1

As a fan of dashboards and graphic representation, I was obviously thrilled when Dashboards were announced back in Sep 2020.

Despite various feedback requests on column type charts, I wanted to just focus on donuts; these are my favourite charts, most visually pleasing! However, I have the three following issues which I really hope can get addressed in the near future. :crossed_fingers:

:one: Legend/Key should be sorted consistently as per custom field

Say you have the same rating values for two different questions in a form:

  1. How would you rate the Star Wars Prequels?
  2. How would you rate the Star Wars Sequels?

The choices/values are the same for both questions (values from two single-select custom fields):

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When the donut charts are populated with various answers, the legends on the right are inconsistent because they are sorted by number of values.

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image3004Ɨ786 79.8 KB

This is very confusing to read for someone scanning through such data. One would expect that the sorting should be consistent and simply to follow the order of the custom field values.
The same should also apply to when selecting ā€˜Download imageā€™.. please :smiley:

:two: Legend/Key should show values, as per ā€˜Download imageā€™

As per above, the legend does not show any values, either in number of tasks or percentages. However, then you click the ... overflow menu and select ā€˜Download Imageā€™, the legend appears with the aforementioned values. Why canā€™t these appear in the native chart?

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Additionally, if instead of using :star:ā€™s we would use text answers, purposely varying in length to show the below issue, there is considerable truncation as indicated below. This could be addressed by text wrapping over two lines of text or, better yet, simply increase the width of the PNG export to consolidate for this.

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image2600Ɨ1136 186 KB

:three: ā€˜Download imageā€™ results should be consistent

There are 3 ways selecting ā€˜Download imageā€™ and each one produces a different result, image ratio, size and layout which is not ideal. The export seems to be based on the way the chart looks from ā€˜whereā€™ it is downloaded from instead of a standard layout, irrelevant to this. (I have purposely added a drop shadow to make clear the outline of the PNGs.)

  1. The chartā€™s ... menu > Download image

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    image2161Ɨ929 136 KB

  2. The chartā€™s full screen icon > ... menu > Download image

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    image1333Ɨ1013 64.9 KB

  3. The chartā€™s :pencil2: icon > ... menu > Download image

    image
    image1139Ɨ1223 58.9 KB

Anyone else with me on this request?

9 Likes
Determine stacked bar chart order
Determine stacked bar chart order
Determine stacked bar chart order
2

Great suggestions; Iā€™m with you and added my vote (remember to add yours too!).

Thanks,

Larry

1 Like
3

Added my vote.
I agree with the consistency request

1 Like
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Iā€™d like to offer some counter discussion, because Iā€™m afraid of a brush thatā€™s too narrow.

  1. What is being asked for here is really the ability to sort by something other than the default option. Sometimes you want a legend sortable by proportion of data (as is typical in a donut chart) other times you want it alphabetical, or custom (which could be the default order of a customer field). I just donā€™t want to lose one in service of another. :slight_smile:

  2. This is likely a design choice in service of minimalistic design. When viewing a chart in Asana, it is wholly interactive, you can bring your cursor over the segments and see the details that makes up that segment. Downloading an image removes the contextualization, and requires it to be added in in that format. But agreed, we could do with options for formatting legends, rather than a default only.

  3. Yeah, I got nothing, that one is definitely weird.

  4. I know you donā€™t have a 4 but Iā€™m adding one, overall user improvements. Let reports be edited by more than 1 person, increase the number of visualizations.

But hey, all of this is why we pull our Asana data into Power BI where I develop it into reports, now the refreshesā€¦ that was the hard part to solve for. But thatā€™s an example of where you can really get granular with how the data are formatted. :slight_smile:

ps. voted.

4 Likes
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Hi @Will.S , thanks for adding to the discussion. All valid points!

But judging from their design decisions so far, I understand Asana are not keen on providing options/toggles etc in lieu of a simplified interface, but Iā€™m hoping these charts would perhaps be an exception. :crossed_fingers:

Agree that Power BI as well as other 3rd party integrations like Screenful can produce far more detailed (and even better looking) results, but I was just hoping for some improvements to the native donut charts in Asana. :person_shrugging:

1 Like
6

Hi, there. Does any update for this topic?
Thank you

7

I agree! Voted.

Some thoughts on this. Like with the related Determine stacked bar chart order, I care more about being able to determine the order than solving it specifically by linking it to custom field settings.

It was the first thing I investigated though when I didnā€™t like the chart order, and the solution does make sense. But to me it also makes sense to be able to modify the order from the dashboard widget. Maybe enable editing custom field settings by clicking the legend when editing the dashboard widget?

Iā€™m trying to think whether there is a situation where youā€™d want to be able to manipulate the custom field value order separate from the chart order. If so, being able to modify these orders separately would be better. At the moment I canā€™t think of any situation though.

In any case I would default to the order set in the custom field over this seemingly random order we have now.

Determine stacked bar chart order
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Yeah, I think editing the legend could be an idea to set the sorting. It would be adding a level of complexity to the tool, but it could be a discreet feature, only for those that want to discover it.

My example above? (where you would want the legend to appear consistently)

9

Or having the option to click through to the ā€œedit custom field settingsā€ through the legend?

I meant a situation where youā€™d want the order to be different from the order the field values are sorted in.

One limitation for instance is that linking it to custom field settings requires that the person making the dashboard chart has edit access to the custom field in question.

My perspective is at its simplest: ā€œI want to change the order of the things in this graph here. Where can I click to make this happen?ā€, and trying to think about the impact of the different ways of solving this.