New Layout for Cross-Listed Projects and Their Custom Fields in Task View (Grouping CF)

Appreciate the attention and response, and look forward to the great things you all put out! :sun_with_face: I’m a huge Asana advocate, especially because of the continual improvements you all make. :raised_hands:

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I agree the layout is not very nice and takes up a heap of space it the task belongs to move than one project.

It’s also now painful to go to the project. Used to be able to click on the project name, but now I have to use the little symbol beside the same that is not very intuitive (at least not to me)

Capture

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I agree but I trust we will adapt and within a few weeks it will be natural. But for many days we’ll be collapsing projects by mistake :sweat_smile:

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
The task fields aren’t displaying properly.
Steps to reproduce:
Occurring with all tasks.
Browser version:
Chrome Version 87.0.4280.88
Upload screenshots below:

Hi @Carrie_Woodhouse, welcome to the Asana Community Forum :wave:

In order to look into this further for you, could you please clarify what issue you are running into with fields displaying in tasks? I can’t see anything specific in your screenshot.

Looking forward to hearing back from you :slight_smile:

Here is an image that shows the fields on the left displayed accurately.


The projects should be grouped together at the top of the within a Project section, with the fields coming below. The error has the fields randomly displayed (collapsable) within the various projects. Does this second image help?

Your latest image is the legacy view, the one in the first post is a new grouping slowly being rolled out (or A/B tested, not sure). Does that help clarify things for you?

Also you can’t opt-out (answering before you ask :sweat_smile: )

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Learned something new @Bastien_Siebman Thanks for pointing this A/B test out.

Hi Bastien - could you link me to a post I may have missed about this rollout/test? I’m a little baffled that we’d see it without notice/communication - or at the very least without the opportunity to provide feedback.

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@Rebecca_McGrath and @Emily_Roman might be able to point you in the right direction. Although not every single update/test is being announced. I am not saying this good or bad, just the way it is.

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Hi @tabitha, A/B tests are not usually announced to the general public. Of course, you always have the opportunity to share any feedback on Asana, whether new or old features, in the #productfeedback category :slight_smile:

Thanks for bringing in the experts, @Bastien_Siebman, and thanks for the context, @Rebecca_McGrath! I understand the desire to conduct an unbiased test in the A/B format, but from an organizational standpoint, blips like these create a bit of a headache.

Can your team explore a notification for select users - perhaps admins and above, or even just super-admins - so that we have a heads up when these UX changes may be occurring? @Carrie_Woodhouse spent over an hour troubleshooting when she saw this interface change yesterday, thinking there was a setting she’d inadvertently toggled.

She then pulled in a couple team members and admins to compare views, and of course we couldn’t replicate, hadn’t seen anything like it, and were unable to advise her. She then spent additional time reviewing the forums, taking screenshots, and making posts of her own to try to get some answers. Much of this time and frustration could have been mitigated by improved, proactive communication regarding potential changes to UX, and clear direction for feedback.

As I’m sure is the case with many users, I’m juggling a wide spectrum of tech savviness and change resistance in my org, and while little changes like these are easily brushed off by some users, for others, it erodes hard-fought trust and confidence in the tools and processes we’ve built to manage day-to-day work.

Thanks for considering.

fyi @AdR

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I second @tabitha. I was another user impacted on the same team as @Carrie_Woodhouse. I didn’t know that this was a feature being tested; I just thought it was something new that was rolled out. Without notification, I didn’t know that we could give feedback.

Since I’ve been working with this view for a few days and can give feedback, I’m not too fond of it. I’m clicking around a lot more, trying to find what I need, and I feel it will cause users to miss critical fields that we need them to fill out as they finish their work. I can see this frequently happening on subtasks where you have to actively click on “Show inherited fields” to display the extra fields. The phrase “Show inherited fields” isn’t intuitive to what’s being hidden, and I shouldn’t have to train my team to find the field I need them to fill out. It should just be there.

I also don’t care what project a field belongs to, so the grouping isn’t helpful for that. As a user, I want to see what fields are included in the ticket since I might need to fill them out or get information from them to do my work. As a manager, if I didn’t want to see the field, I wouldn’t have added it to the project or, vice-versa, added that ticket to the project.

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Like others here, I’m also not a fan of the new design–for a few reasons.

It’s great that Asana is innovating here but I’m sad to see this direction of using expand/collapse sections.

Collapsible sections lead to requests, as we’ve seen here (as often as weekly for years, and I noted one or two just in the last 24 hours), for remembering the state, setting different initial defaults, settings to control these (which Asana design is loathe to add), expand all and collapse all buttons, etc. And even if these features were all added, it doesn’t solve the problem of streamlining navigation w/o scrolling, nor the problem of having to click a lot to collapse/expand. Reasons why Asana’s own developer docs avoid and many other user experiences employ that approach.

Most of my career was spent in user interface design and development and usability so the above is from my experience. For this particular change, I can tell you that personally as a user of Asana I won’t appreciate the hiding of custom fields or the increased interaction with expand/collapse buttons required.

I proposed the following during a major Asana redesign beta years ago, and wrote it up (rather poorly, but hope it conveys the idea) two years ago here in the forum, but I’m not sure if the current design team ever considered the idea. It is essentially: A sticky navigation tabs bar at the top of the Task Detail pane so you can click (or use shortcut) to vertically auto-scroll-with-animation instead to desired sections of the Task Detail pane, instead of the direction you’re headed:

Thanks,

Larry

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Agreed, this would be a great feature! There are so many times during meetings where we’re looking up something in Asana and there’s a “Hold on, let me just scroll through this task to get to the details” pause that disrupts our flow. That’s just one small (and less significant) example of how having better navigation would create lots of efficiencies for our team.

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Had a nearly identical experience to this yesterday. I hope this change doesn’t go out to all users because our organization relies heavily on these custom fields in cross-listed tasks and we’ll have to redesign our entire workflow or train dozens of employees to click an extra 4 times to find what they are looking for. Neither option will be particularly pleasant for us. I would prefer the legacy layout with the option to filter the visibility of fields inside a task only to those relevant for some selected projects. Such a change would even be an improvement over the legacy layout, but this A/B tested version is proving to be a major pain for the selected users in my office.

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I also would really rather not have these expand/collapse sections - it means that when you open a project and they’re all expanded, the first task has to be to close them, and it still takes more scrolling to get to the bottom of the notes.

Also, the way we work is that when our work on a job is finished, we need to change a field in each of the boards it’s on - previously that was very quick as they were all drop-downs grouped at the top of the job, but now it will be a case of opening a section, finding that field, changing it, closing the section, and repeating for each of them.

Essentially, the new style doesn’t add anything useful to our way of working and instead will add frustration and time (and the potential for error). Can this be an opt-in/opt-out?

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I hear you, @tabitha. I regret to see that time was wasted troubleshooting what turned out to be an A/B test. I’ve passed this feedback onto our Product team.

I’d like to mention that if you apply to become an Asana Ambassador, you will receive notice of any upcoming A/B test and product updates (before they’re rolled out publicly). This might be an option for you or someone in your Organisation.

Thanks, Rebecca, for the suggestion! The Ambassador program looks interesting - I’ll dig into it a bit with my team.

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Following up my linked post above,

I’ve updated this post:

to show that Asana has implemented my recommendation to handle navigation/scrolling in the long Customize menu:

image

I wish they’d use the exact same approach in all of Task Detail as explained in the linked post.

Larry

1 Like