📝 Take your Asana forms to the next level with emojis, expand buttons and other hacks

[Richard_Sather]

Forms in Asana are super powerful, helping you to convert intake data into a standardised format that can easily become actionable tasks whilst also extracting useful data in dashboards. And best of all, you get the submitters to fill out all your custom fields in the tasks that the form creates for you

Below are some tips to help you make your forms easier to digest, prettier to look at and therefore more enjoyable to fill out. Who ever said ‘I hate forms’?!

Note: screenshots and GIFs are captured in March 2024. The product constantly evolves so some surfaces & settings may appear differently.

Visually dividing sections and subsections within your form

Use emojis of numbers and/or shapes as visual markers/cues to help define the parts of each form as well as for sub-parts / sub-sections. You may also think of complimenting emojis with a numbering system, such as Part A, B, C and the questions within each part to be A1, A2, A3 etc.

Creating subheadings for instructions & prompts

Unlike questions, where you can add a description, you cannot currently add a description to a Heading. If you want to add a subheading, add a multi-select question below it and use it’s title field without including any options, as per below.

Your final form will not render any checkboxes, so this ‘question’ will simply appear as descriptive text (see first screenshot, above), which can be used for prompting the submitter or setting the expectation for the next part of your form.

Create an ‘add details’ button to expose more questions

Having several subquestions within a question can be confusing to a submitter - where does one question end, where does the other begin. To make your form more readable and clear, you can try using a number system wherever possible. But you may have a situation where you can use an ‘add details’ button

Add a multi-select question, as per below, titled ‘Click below to add details’, make it required and add a single option ‘ Add details’ and create a branch for it. Within the branch, and add all the questions you want within the branch. The actual form will render as per the GIF above, so by clicking anywhere on the ‘ Add details’ text, it will expand the other questions.

Create an ‘add another’ dropdown button to input more data

You may also have a situation where you want the submitter to add additional input.
In this case, having filled out three questions on their goals (which in this case is the minimum we require from them) we can then give them an option to add a 4th and a 5th goal.

To achieve this, in your last visible question (the 3rd in our case), add a single-select field, as per below screenshot.

Make sure they know how to submit

Finally, at the end of your form you may want to make it clear that the submitter has reached the end of the form and needs to click on the submit button. I usually use this text “ Please click on the blue ‘Submit’ button below”, either placed in a Heading or as the title of a multi-select question. This is what they look like in the final form (obviously use one version):

And this is how you build these in the form, either using a heading:

or using a multi-select field, without any options:

Use the confirmation message to set the expectation, including links!

In your form’s settings, you may want to edit the ‘Confirmation massage’ section instead of the default ‘Your submission has been received’. Feel free to edit this to thank the submitter for filling out the form, confirming they have completed and submitted correctly, perhaps using some emojis or links for next steps.

Additionally, you can also use this message to set the expectation on when you will be getting back to them and using which method of communication, or even adding links to websites or emails for them to contact, such as below:

Once form the submitter successfully submits a form, the confirmation message will appear as per below (note the clickable links):

Note, if your form access setting is set to ‘Organization only’ then you can enable the ‘Add submitters in my organization as task collaborators’ switch. When enabled, Asana will automatically also include the below text, which you cannot edit, so make sure you don’t double up on that information in your confirmation message too!

Lastly, if you enable the Show a button to “Add another submission”…

…it will do exactly what it says, appearing as below:

References:

• Is there a way to uncap the max number of questions? - #8 by Christine_Bolton
• Add Textual Help/Instruction-Only Question in an Asana Form [Hack!]
• Is there the ability to add HELP TEXT to a form? - #2 by lpb

So, how will you power-up your forms?

See all of my top tips & tricks on my website.

[Bastien_Siebman]

Pretty great list. The “add details” is nice!

[Arthur_BEGOU]

Super cool and creative, thanks @Richard_Sather

[Rashad_Issa]

This is a very great and extensive piece! Thanks @Richard_Sather