Thought I would start a new Topic on Left pane thoughts and ideas. So I will kick it off with a couple:
My number one of course is the ability to expand and collapse all teams with a ± at the top. This would make navigation of the team so much quicker.
The other one I though of, what if you were able to hover over a project and see all other projects that any task in the project was sharing with. Don’t necessarily want to see all the task, although a click of that could be an additional feature.
As I mentioned in a recent posts, maybe Asana could consider the concept of “Stacks” that Evernote uses, which in essence allows projects to be put in what looks like a project but is really more of a folder. Then Asana would not have the massive programming I assume would be needed to add a new hierarchy. https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208314158-How-to-organize-notebooks-into-stacks
How do you organize your left pane?
So any other compliments for the left pane design, how you organize or suggestions for improvement
On another system they keep the Teams on the Nav bar as simple text Tabs, I’m sure this will only work so far as the text can be read so it’s not a perfect solution but it does make it very easy and fast to switch between teams.
Hello,
Some of the teams in our small organization does complain about the left pane.
We have a lot of projects and it can be quite difficult to quickly find a project.
I think the most obvious solution would be to increase the width of the left pane, and/or make it adjustable. Maybe make it like in other programs that it out expands when you hover the mouse over the “collapsed” pane. Like in fx Adobe Lightroom.
A couple of other suggestions:
Remove the “pictures” of team members - I think they are making the left pane more cluttered than it needs to be.
Make it possible to collapse/remove the “Team conversations” and “team calender” since they are also adding to the cluttter.
And i agree with the idea to add the ability to expand and collapse all teams and the idea of stacking.
I don’t have enough tasks in a list with other people to confirm this but you may want to try “Compact Mode” which can be found in the Personal Profile settings panel. It seems to loose about 5-10 pixels per task on the List Views but I don’t see a change on Board Views.
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Make it possible to collapse/remove the “Team conversations” and “team calender” since they are also adding to the cluttter.[/quote]
There is also a tiny double chevron on the left of project nav panel that will collapse it and save some vertical space and clutter.
Thank you for your suggestions. I am trying out the compact mode, right now.
But it does not affect the left pane as far as i can see.
I have always had the “header” collapsed. I do not see the need for such a large header. But again, as far as i can see it does not affect the left pane.
@briankb you find it easy to navigate the left pane? At this time i have around 10 teams in the left pane, and about 50-60 projects spread out between then. A significant portion has projects names that are longer than the current width of the left pane. I am not the project owner of them all, or have task in them, but i need to be able to acces all the projects and so does all other people in the company.
I know we can improve our “project naming” to mitigate the problem a bit, but i think it would be better to make the pane a bit wider by default, and expandable.
NO! It’s crazy busy and even if you do the ALL CAPS for project names like I have adopted by seeing other examples use it. It is still too busy. It did help when I learned you could manually drag/drop any Team or Project to organize it.
I don’t think there is a magic trick to make large number or long project names. If you do the second level Top Nav for Teams, like Flow does, you will hit a problem with either number of teams or length of team names whichever comes first to block it. You could always wrap that to multiple levels of team names but it will have a deminishing return on its usability.
Thinking about it now I have one idea that would at least help and its almost available. Add the ability, per user or per Organization (ideally BOTH) to have “Groups” in your Favorites list. And within those groups you could collapse/expand and drag/drop to organize.
Hi there! My name is Katie, and I’m a Product Manager at Asana. Thanks so much for your feedback on our sidebar, I agree there is a lot of opportunity for us to improve here. In the meantime, I thought I might share some ‘hacks’ we use here at Asana:
Adding a project as a ‘Favorite’ will put it at the top of your sidebar, This will allow often visited projects to be handy and easily accessible.
Similar to the ‘all caps’ method, we sometimes create ‘shell’ projects to use as dividers (see ‘Pipeline’) to organize similar projects into ‘folders’. To do so, simply create a project and provide some extra ==== in the title.
I agree totally with your thoughts James. I also want some “auto-sort” capabilities. Alphabetical, by Owner, Date Created, etc. We just took the leap to Premium, and I saw the “fake project” hack mentioned below, and making projects a Favorite to push them to the top of the Left Pane.
For a product that is focused on nearly-endless customization of use, the Left Pane’s restrictions seem odd to me.
Thanks for starting this thread…
KC
During a meeting today implementing Asana in a large Church the Executive Pastor in charge of implementation indicated how much easier it would be if the left pane was collapsible and expandable in a single click and it was difficult to scroll to the right Team and project. I have been clamoring for this straight forward improvement for some time and of course agree. Ease of use is so important so I appeal again.
I would like to see the option of disabling the links to Team Conversations,Team Calendar, and list of people on each team on the sidebar.
I would like to have the option to only see my projects listed under the team titles, otherwise it can be a bit difficult visually to find what project you are looking for.
@Katie how do you see so much text in your let pane? Ours just shows about 10-12 characters and basically team names and project names are barely recognisable
