The recent launch of the task pane which groups fields by projects has created quite a stir in the forum and rightly so as it is a heavy-traffic surface and any changes can be challenging, for both sides of the spectrum; for the Asana designers and the end users to navigate.
I have also personally found it adds more friction than solving an issue, at least for my team and the way we have structured our Asana system to work for us.
However, as the saying goes; out of every crisis, there is an opportunity.
I was building a demo last week for an HR Database that needed to contain multiple properties of each Staff Member and I realised that the projects in the task details pane could act as separators to group fields by ‘categories’ or ‘sections’. Here is a mock up of the demo, that I thought others would find interesting or an inspiration on rethinking how we could use this new ‘grouping of fields by projects’ layout in the new task details pane.
Collapsed view of projects used as field ‘sections’:
An expanded field ‘section’:
Note, that all the grey coloured projects are actually archived, so they are hidden from a Team’s All work view, and each of these projects contain specific fields that other projects don’t, so there’s no duplication of fields between categories (although there could be if one wanted to, of course). The orange project ‘Staff Datasheets’ would contain just the basic fields needed to scroll through the staff database’s List view.
I’m not sure if Asana’s designers ever expected projects would be used in such a way, when they redesigned the task details pane this time around, but I think it could be useful in some use cases.. that is, until Asana’s next iteration! Hopefully, we will see some improvements come sooner than later that will resolve the current friction and hopefully give users, the best of both worlds perhaps!?
