Years of adding a colon to create a section…that’s a lot of muscle memory that we’re suddenly supposed to forget. It’s like being asked to forget copy/paste keyboard shortcuts. I can’t think of another example of a company simply removing fundamental functionality from a product.
We have dozens of people using Asana. Not one of us cares about being able to switch between boards and lists, yet most of us are flabbergasted by this change. I don’t see how this change can be rationalized. Surely there is another way.
I stopped using Asana a while ago because the lack of the ability to switch between list and board. However, I loved the product and I kept coming back once in a while to see the status of the feature, so I could eventually use it again. It thought it would be good news to finally see it coming to production, however at the cost of THIS VERY ESSENTIAL FEATURE that makes Asana stand out from all others?
You are transforming a fluid user experience into a huge annoyance.
Transforming colons into sections was THE feature that made me love the product in the first place and now it’s gone. Plus, you had the ability to copy/paste stuff from unstructured text from clients or other people who does not use Asana into a structured project with a simple Ctrl+V. Removing this is a product killer imho.
Remember the basics: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” So, get back to work and deliver Lists and Boards as views, PLUS the semicolon shortcut, even if its hidden in the “hacks” section. Not one OR the other, this is a extremely painful tradeoff and you should figure out how to deliver both features in an elegant way. That’s not impossible.
If the user write “:” in the board view, just ignore it, or open a popup asking if he/she wants to transform the card into a column. It’s better than simply removing it from list view and kill the UX for 46% of your user base who voted to NOT remove it.
We have our entire Asana built around Sections and Tasks. We liked just adding a “:” to a task to turn it into a section. I realize we can turn it into a Milestone, then Remove Milestone to get it to look like a section but the extra step is tedious. Why not just make them 2 completely different things?
Add me to the deafening cacophony of dismayed voices and demanding our colon functionality back.
Seriously, you can’t underestimate how key that is to everyone’s workflow, and more importantly to the core feature that differentiates Asana and made so many people love it (past tense): the beautiful, user-friendly simplicity and flexibility.
Not being able to copy and paste groups of items, not being able to toggle items between tasks and section, not being able to add sections on mobile (!), not being able to divide up existing lists by seamlessly adding section headers in the middle, and just not being able to add sections anywhere, anytime, unconsciously and frictionlessly.
You sacrificed all that so we can flip between two fundamentally different types of task organisation that are clearly designed for different purposes?
That’s just effing annoying. Please listen to all the frustration you’ve caused.
I feel like you’re missing the real frustration here. Changing a keyboard shortcut is really annoying, sure, but something people can get used to. Changing core functionality of the product is a whole other thing. You simplicly can’t use Asana the same way anymore, no matter how much you retrain your muscle memory. People’s workflows are deeply impacted. You won’t get the data on that because a lot will just stop using the product, or just be way unhappier every time they do.
Your explanation (the “under the hood” paragraph) basically says you’re sacrificing lists - the core of your product that’s been there forever - in favour of boards. That seems backwards to me.
Tab+N is a fine addition if the old functionality remains or if Tab+N converted a line to a section. The use case for me is rarely ‘I want to create a new section’ but rather ‘I need to convert this task into a section’.
Love Asana, use it every day. Used “colons convert tasks to sections” everyday, haven’t used Boards once. I totally understand that toggling between Lists and Boards is a necessary function for some users. However, it looks like by accommodating some users, Asana is taking away a lot of functionality from other users: converting tasks to sections and vice-versa, copypasting templates, still haven’t found a way to create sections on my phone; not to mention the speed and ergonomics of using simple “:” to create tasks. That’s just not a Pareto improvement and as Matt’s impromptu poll shows, more users would actually prefer the old functionality.
I’ve recently read Asana’s blog post about rebranding which I found very useful to restructure our own company. This product update reminded me of the mission statement you had there — Help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly. I think this small but core and intuitive functionality was exactly the “effortless” use you are speaking of. And now a lot of users feel cheated when the effortless workflow is taken away from them.
This is worse than I first thought… This is a Terribile breaking change.
Features Broken with this update
Copy and paste from Notepad gives nice simple layout
Converting a ‘task’ to a ‘section’ is now impossible
Converting a ‘section’ to a ‘task’ is now impossible
Each of the above were major factors in choosing Asana, particularly the ease of turning a task to a section. Logicially, a simple ‘task’ often turns into a whole section with some sub tasks… this was a USP of Asana… gone.
Yes, finally, being able to ‘click to add section’ is great when introducing novice users, but once you get used to asana, : is just simpler and faster.
Why, when converting from a ‘board’ to a ‘list’, would you simply not just add/remove the colons anyway as needed.
I think this should be a company @domain level option to choose at a minimum.
I implemented the “Convert task to section and vice versa (Tab+:)” feature in my Chrome extension, Asana Navigator (linked to Chrome Web Store).
Motivation
I often create task lists and subtask lists by copying & pasting the lines from template text, and all lines ending with a colon used to be created as sections, but they no longer are. I felt just as much frustration as everyone else in this thread.
As an Asana Ambassador, I not only love Asana as the product. I love the philosophy behind Asana’s UI. “Asana Open House” is one of my favorite talk videos. Watch it from 19m00s to 19m50s. The beauty of Asana has been that it’s as easy and fast as using a text editor, while it has a strong data structure to support our work graph. It stayed true how many new features Asana has built, but I feel this is the first time that the speed was sacrificed for the structure.
I’m really sad, but reading this thread and Sections are dead! Long live sections! for developers, I found that this is a final decision and our complaints might not be able to reverse it. So I built the feature myself.
Conversion by Asana Navigator
Asana Navigator does exactly what is written in the below post by @Joe_Trollo. It creates a new section/task with the same name as the original task/section, and then deletes the original task/section.
This is “Tab+:” in action:
This works where Tab+N is supported. Specifically, either on a task in the middle pane of a project view or my task view, or on a subtask in the subtask list in the right pane.
My workflow has been changed to something like below:
Before: I copy & paste lines of text into Asana, and all lines ending with a colon would be created as sections
After: I copy & paste lines of text into Asana. After that, I manually do “Tab+:” > “Enter” against all lines ending with a colon to convert them to sections
Considerations
Technically speaking, currently my extension only supports projects “not_migrated” to the new data model. I’ll continue developing the feature to support “migrated” projects, too.
As you can see in the above video, it’s painfully slow compared to the original Asana feature. It’s proof of how good the original feature was. I’m still sad that the auto-conversion feature is now missing in Asana.
Hi @Michael_C_Kring and my sincere apologies for the inconvenience here; We’re hoping to re-implement the ability to create sections via mobile as soon as possible. For the latest updates, you can follow this post.
I am looking forward to that. How about changing the “shortcut” to :: or in words double colon. That would solve many
of the problems I see people writing.
Another problem is adding a section as a subtask. First I choose the subtask icon, wich makes a new task. Then i can add the section with tab+n. Then I have to delete the first subtask. Another argument for using :: as a shortcut instead of tab+n.
@Michael_C_Kring
If you press Tab+N when the focus is in the right pane, a section is created in the subtask list in the right pane, instead of creating a section in the middle pane. Please give it a try.
By the way I like your idea of “::” and I also think Asana could reserve the colon solely for sections.
