Not intuitive: "Mark completed + left a comment" = single Inbox notification without comment text

Here are three cases and how they are presented in colleagues’ Asana Inboxes:

  1. Leave a comment: The comment text (along with a comment icon)
  2. Mark a subtask as completed: A sentence (“Bob completed this task.”)
  3. Both: Just the “Bob completed this task” sentence and the comment icon—no comment text!

I can’t figure out why things should work this way. One tiny icon is the only way to differentiate between cases 2 and 3. This means comments can easily be missed if you move on to the next subtask without explicitly checking for the icon (there’s a lot going on visually in the Inbox, so I wouldn’t count on this habit coming easily/naturally) or opening the completed subtask and scrolling to the bottom.

There seems to be no workaround: Filtering by “@mentions” doesn’t alter this in any way—the completion sentence still muscles the comment text off into only having an icon.

Can you please change this so Asana always includes the comment text, regardless of whether the person also marked the subtask complete?

I want to bump this up! I’m surprised there’s not more votes. Very often, the last thing you’ll do before marking a task complete is leave a final comment.

My workaround is to make sure I check the “complete” checkbox first, and then add a comment. In that instance, I think the other person gets the comment text in their Inbox. But if you comment first, and then mark complete, it’s very easy to miss the comment text.

1 Like

I believe what you are looking for is the “Expand” button at the top of the Inbox! That would show all activities since last seen, not just one!

4 Likes

Thank you so much, Bastien! Again I feel a bit foolish here. Not once did I think that that’s what “Expand” would do—somehow the wording and icon seemed to suggest making the whole section bigger (maybe at the expense of a sidebar?) rather than ungrouping activity. I think if it were called “ungroup” I might have clued in.

Also, I think ungrouping/expanding would be a much more user-friendly default. Despite having posted this thread months ago, I somehow forgot about this issue, and met with an even worse symptom of it, which is that not just one comment can be hidden, but an entire thread of new comments! This simply does not make sense to me for a communication app, especially one that suggests you may not need to click through, by providing interaction buttons on notifications (thumbs up, archive, etc.)

Also, I just discovered that if you archive an expanded notification, then try to move it back to the inbox, you may only get to move one piece of it back, and the other apparently no longer exists in the inbox or the archive. At least, this is true for one I tried just now that had been “changed the due date” followed by “assigned to me”—now I can only move the “changed the due date” notification back and forth between inbox and archive, and the “assigned to me” notification is nowhere to be found (“expand” or not.)

1 Like

I 100% agree, expanding should be the default. I missed a couple of comments because of this.

3 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 9 days. New replies are no longer allowed.