UI change - Project tabs/buttons in tasks pushed down

Iā€™m no longer sure about the user data assumption. This issue is not the only UI change moving in a certain direction, there is also Navigation Updates and quick access to My Tasks and Inbox

It is a possibility that Asanaā€™s focus is now shifting into a direction that attempts to cover needs of users in the mass market. These ā€œsimplificationsā€ seem to be targeting novice users, who might not actually have the slightest idea of project management.

Such a strategic direction might have very little in common with our needs. Luckily, there are other options in the meantime; for example, Zenkit comes very close to Asanaā€™s feature-set.

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I assume this change relates to the update I have just received ( https://asana.com/guide/help/faq/task-pane-updates ). This is an absolutely ridiculous change. Why on earth would you put task project labels below the task description. This is nuts. Can we revert back to the old UI?

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Voicing my disappointment at this change and Asanaā€™s response. I get that the voices here are a vocal minority of the wider userbase, but surely the opinions here (and those that are surely not being voiced) carry some weight?

Why not make the task pane order configurable? I have no idea what the underlying codebase looks like, or what knock-on effects that would have, but itā€™s surely possible?

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Other alternatives that weā€™re now exploring are:

Anyone have any experience using these?

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Wow @Marie

You felt the need to remove the word ā€œunhelpfulā€ from this post title?

Welcome to the ministry of truthā€¦

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Thanks for your feedback @Chris_Sylvester. Donā€™t get me wrong here, I have only corrected this title to include all feedback regarding this UI change (positive and negative) and to maintain a respectful tone in the community (FAQ - Asana Community Forum). You will notice that I havenā€™t changed or removed any of the posts, even the most passionate ones. Iā€™m more than happy to discuss this further via messages if you wish to, but I donā€™t want to spam this thread dedicated to UI feedbacks with further comments regarding moderation.

We welcome every comment and feedback and although we canā€™t always satisfy everyone, we do value and consider all feedback (positive and negative). Iā€™d highly recommend you to take a look at @Alexis post above (UI change - Project tabs/buttons in tasks pushed down - #52 by Alexis) but of course, feel free to reach out to me directly if this is something you want to discuss further.

All the best Chris,

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@Marie we keep hearing a theme from Asana in this post along the lines of ā€œchange is hardā€ and ā€œwe arenā€™t able to please everyone all the time, every time.ā€

Can you please help us to understandā€¦ if clearly this thread is filled with a number of us that are not pleased by the UI change because it counteracts major purpose in the tool to organize parts of action within the broader missionā€¦ who out there sees it differently? Who out there is pleased with the change? Who is the everyone else with louder voices and stronger reasoning that sees benefit in burying projects and tags bellow the description field? Iā€™m having trouble finding feedback from that other half. While of course, it is not possible to please everyone- who can disagree with that? Itā€™s only clear to us here who is not pleased and the many reasons why.

Soā€¦ @Marie can you pull back the curtain a little bit and reveal who is enjoying this change and why? What have they come to realize that weā€™re not? That clarity and transparency might help us to understand the value in the UI change that we plainly cannot (yet?) see.

And please help us understand how we can now best manage our projects within the new UI without being able to clearly see how the parts of the work are organized.

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Yes, we tried all three of them and 33 more in our evaluation two years ago, in which Asana was the clear winner.

  • Trello is perfectly sufficient if you have a small amount of projects with little to no overlap and your team members are typically working on a single project only. (There is no sensible view Ć  la My Tasks in Trello to plan your personal agenda.)

  • Flow does not focus on tasks, but resource planning; not really comparable.

  • Hitask seems to have changed since we tested it, so I donā€™t want to comment on it without testing it again. If you know it, Iā€™d be happy to learn about your insights and how it compares to Asana.

Right now, the biggest contenders for Asana are:

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Hi @Chris_Sylvester, @Paul_Hoogeveen, and all our wonderful members on this thread :wave: I wanted to chime in to build off @Marieā€™s points and to speak to the reasoning behind these changes.

Let me start again by saying thank you for taking the time to write up this feedback and continuing to provide your thoughts on this thread. Having an active Community is super helpful to us as we build Asana and we appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us! We apologize that this change has been frustrating and difficult to get used to.

Regarding the changes, we set out to update our task pane to make it very clear for everyone using Asana what the task is, who itā€™s assigned to, when itā€™s due, and how to complete the task. We also know that many first time users of Asana are very confused about how to actually complete a task. Since completing tasks is core to successfully using Asana, we wanted to be sure it was crystal clear how to complete work and keep projects moving forward. From testing this change, weā€™ve seen that for many users, especially newer users, having the complete task button clearer and more prominent makes it easier for them to understand how to use Asana.

As we set about making the complete task button and top line task information more prominent, we also made some other changes to the task pane to make task details more prominent, since weā€™ve gotten feedback that many users want to get to the heart of the task content as quickly as possible. This means that the taskā€™s project information is shown under the description. We definitely hear you that this can get annoying to scroll through a large description to get to the project info and will continue to keep and eye on this feedback to help inform future updates to our task pane.

Because people can use Asana for so many different types of work, we often rely on feedback and product usage data to guide decisions like this one. Our hope in using data to make this decision is to make this work for as many users as possible, but we do apologize for any frustration this caused. Our team will continue to work on updating our task pane to make it easy for Asana users to work out of, and will keep all of this feedback in mind as we do!

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If a ā€œchange has been frustrating and difficult to get used toā€ and invokes this level of passionate debate, then clearly the change is wrong. Changes to a UI should never be hard - they should always enhance the user experience, not detract from it.

This change needs to be reversed.

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Hi @katie, thanks for your reply. I see you copy-pasted some text from the comment from @louis. It seems you are just saying the same thing, or is there something new to take from your comment? (I didnā€™t compare the two texts, but there is really a lot just the same)

I wanted to purchase Asana Premium today, but after these changes just today, I am not sure any more. Weā€™ve bought the Asana Premium still, but all people here are complaining about having the project+tag below the description. Having the projects and tags below the project description is awful for consistent and clear task-info.

I like the mark complete button, I like the fresher look, and I like the rich-text editing in the description field.

My simple requests for the task panes would be:

Put the project and tags above the description

  • Have every top of every card visually consistent instead of floating project/tags depending on the length of the description

Replace the ā€˜copy linkā€™ button with the ā€˜tagsā€™ button. (or make it customizable)

  • not force first-time users to learn a keyboard short-cut to easily add a tag. I think your data shows tags are used more often than copying links from tasksā€¦
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Hi David. Just wanted to note Tab+P is the shortcut to add a task to a project or several projects. Totally agree with your feedback as written. Not sure why that shortcut isnā€™t on the Asana keyboard shortcut list.

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Hi

Latest changes on Asana are so nice, we love it ! But one of the last implemented update is not so nice ā€¦

I speak about the ā€œprojectā€ field in a task, which is now on the bottom of it. Itā€™s really perturbing, moreover if task description is long.

Some rollback or parameter to change that will be added ?

Thanks in advance, Asana rocks !

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Thanks for all your feedback and your kind words @MKH. Unfortunately, it is not possible to roll back this change but weā€™re gathering all feedback on UI change - Project tabs/buttons in tasks pushed down, so if tahtā€™s ok, Iā€™m just going to merge your post with this existing one. For more context on what motivated us to make this design change, Iā€™d advise you to take a look at Louisā€™ (UI change - Project tabs/buttons in tasks pushed down - #45 by louis) and Katieā€™s post (UI change - Project tabs/buttons in tasks pushed down - #140 by Kaitie)

Our organization workspace just got this change today. I was really, really hoping you were reconsidering this change as I have been using the new interface on another workspace I belong to, and it makes the process of managing the work a whole lot more work!!!

The whole idea of Asana is to spend time doing the work not working on managing the work!

These actions that I do everyday take so much longer and generally involve a lot of scrolling

  • Get new task (these can come from a number of sources and many have emails or other long text as part of description), assign to project and section - Project and Section need to be at the top!

  • Tag a task - we use tags for specific purposes ā€” It is now hidden in more actions. If you must hide an icon, I never use copy link (why when you can @mention??) - donā€™t hide add a tag under more actions, or make the top list of icon actions user-configurable

  • Complete a task or review a task and move it to a new section - having to scroll down below a lot of description, or in general having the project section located in a different place on every task is making think about the interface instead of the work.

  • The yellow warning that the task is public - I donā€™t get at all. Visually it is the most prominent thing about the task in the my tasks section and is distracting

  • The giant mark as complete button ā€“ make that a user choice of display as well - ok for the first day you use asana, but when all your tasks are here and you ā€œcheckā€ some off every day - why would you not ā€œget used toā€ the checkmark?

We love Asana and the way it has streamlined our communications and processes, but this is a step backwards in usability.

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@Donna_B Spot on for every point!

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This is the only point I disagree with. We use ā€˜copy linkā€™ all the time in other, non-integrated software. But Iā€™d love to have the ā€˜tagā€™ icon back where it was because I use it all the time :slight_smile:

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Agreed - this is very counter-intuitive for us, the description section can sometimes get long as we add a lot of info in here like brief details or specs.

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Please move the project buttons back up to the top. I hate scrolling through long descriptions to find it (every single task sent in from email has a description long enough to push the project off the screen). Iā€™m wasting precious time finding this over and over each day. Overall I like the other changes but I canā€™t say that they are saving me any of the time I now waste b/c the project field is buried.

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Hi @Matt_Eggers! One good workaround is to use the ā€œTab+Pā€ shortcut to automatically get to the ā€œProjectā€ field without having to scroll through the task description. Hope this helps!

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