I second people being frustrated about a forced update that will absolutely have a negative impact on our performance. Actions like this make us loose trust on the future direction of Asana (also lack of responses on highly sought features such as markdown support). The new view is completely half baked and on some levels objectively worse - if you look at eye movement needed to gather information per task (especially if you use tags). As others have mentioned one of the main competitive advantages of Asana was simplicity which is something you are eroding with these kind of updates.
My biggest question is: What would the team of Asana need to be persuaded that they need to at least partially roll back this UX disaster?
I am of the opinion that you should allow users to customize their workflows by having the ability to bring back the detail of a hidden column as it was in the previous UI. That means we sometimes do not want to see a whole column just because in within dozens of tasks only one has a special custom Tag. This is annoying.
I propose we, as users, could hide a column and make it appear as an inline tag.
Above all: KISS! This update goes against that design rule.
Also, as a consideration on your change process, I would also suggest you follow a period of adaptation by allowing users (and whole companies) to select legacy UI while testing the new changes.
Rolling surprises like this to whole enterprises that base their workflow on your solution might cause more harm than good. Google is a good example on how this process should work - remember they still have the option for plain text gmail and up until some time ago they were testing a new UI which they decided to not roll out. They way they did it, since it was completely different from the previous UI, was by giving users options (have a look here: Here's how to switch to the new Gmail design | TechRadar ).
There is a huge cost on deciding for one UI: you will need to accommodate two types of users: the ones who want to stay on the old UI and the ones eager to use the new (just because).
Ask your engineer team to figure out the scroll of the new excel list, itās wrong.
Hope you figure out how to navigate this turmoil you generated.
Weāre using the list view for simple To Do Lists ā which means, we only need one column. As we also have a project with a huge kanban board, we need to display Asana on big monitors in full screen. Guess what happens in the new list view? Huge empty lines across the whole screen!
How is this an improvement? If I could at least adjust the column width I could maybe find a way to emulate the old view, but I canāt.
This is a huge step back from a clear design to a cluttered design. If Iād want a spreadsheet, Iād use a spreadsheet.
Hate the new way it looks, like most do not like this spreadsheet type view. I also picked Asana for itās simple view etc. Spent a long time looking for the right app and now completely disappointed by this step back.
here is my feedback:
the grid with lines is a bit too much for the eye in my opinion
when clicking on a task it opens the detail view as before, great, but it would be nice to be able to close the detail view by clicking on the task again, without having to go click on the closing icon at the top right corner.
Youāre assuming that a new āSpreadsheet-Inspiredā view is a good thing for everybody!
Whilst I love spreadsheets, most of the time removing the grid lines is my default. This update makes looking at and working with tasks within projects really awful.
Bring back the nice a ācleanā view we had before please!
Yes, the new interface is a complete mess! I donāt understand why the Asana organization thought an update in this manner was warranted. If I wanted a spreadsheet display, I would use Google Sheets!
I really like the implications of going with a grid direction, thereās lots of great potential here. Imagine having custom fields that can interlink with each other. For example to have a custom field āallocated timeā (budgeted estimate) and āactual timeā (which links up with either an external timer, or something native to Asana), with a link between the fields of ādifferenceā showing how much actual time we have left from the allocated, or how much time weāve gone over. Think weāre seeing the beginning of a much bigger set of features here, which is probably why Asana felt the need to push this throughā¦ But maybe they did push it through to early.
Might have been good to wait until:
user can resize cells, equal cell sizes for unequal amounts of information is clutter.
user control of cell justification, for tags itād be great to put that column on the far left and justify it flush right so the tags populate out like they did in on the old list view. naturally lets the amount of information scale if it needs to. For certain fields center justification makes sense, for others right flush.
Other minor critiques are the section divisions are now a mess. We need to have clear lines going across separating out the section. Picking background color of a section header would be a great solution here! Would also be nice to let the user control what fields are still visible when viewing details of a task, right now it expands hiding basically everything but the due date (which is sometimes a less important field).
This update is detrimental to my workflow on my large monitor. Things are all over the screen now instead of in the narrow column they were before. My eye cannot track across the screen to see due dates, assignee, etc. Please consider adding some white space to the left and right on larger screens again so that list view is more usable.
I cant stand this update. Asana became a glorified spreadsheet. My entire team despises the update. I cant imagine that more people actually like it then dont.
I think there should be an option for people to revert the update if they would like. If not i think iām going to have to find a new work management software.
The decision to hide the tags by default should be reconsidered. It was a very unwelcome change in our organization, and honestly a PITA to change back one project at a time.
