Hi, all!
Sorry that this feels like such a usability issue - here at Asana we use our product more heavily than almost any customer (as you might imagine!) and retraining ourselves to use Tab+N instead of a colon has been quite a hurdle (at least for me 
). We totally understand how this change feels like a “gotcha” until you rebuild your muscle memory for the new behavior because we’re still getting used to it (caught by it!) ourselves
The biggest challenge in building good software is making hard tradeoffs, and this new behavior is the shadow side that we’ve adopted in order to build a highly-requested product improvement: switching between board and list views.
The nature of what has to happen “under the hood” to make that possible means that sections in list views have to act very like columns in a board view - and the Tab+N behavior is a result of us moving toward that world. For one example, ending a task in a board column with a colon doesn’t split off a new column which contains the tasks below the task with a colon. If you think about it, however, this is what has been happening in a list view–the new section suddenly takes ownership of all the tasks below it. This is why Tab+N creates a new (empty) section at the end of the current section - this is akin to what happens when creating a new empty column in a board view.
So despite the fact that this group already has opinions on Tab+N (and therefore this poll isn’t very scientifically rigorous), I’d be interested to ask the group for opinions on which future state of Asana is better:
- Freely toggle projects between
boardandlistviews, but we must keep Tab+N behavior for list sections - Freely toggle tasks between regular tasks and sections using a colon, but projects must either be created as a
boardor alistand cannot ever be toggled between the two views.
To be further clear, I doubt that the results of this poll will change our course in moving to switching between project layouts (we have a lot of data and feedback that this is highly desired by our customers and from an engineering standpoint there are a lot of benefits from it) but hopefully it provides some insight into why we made this change.