UI change - Project tabs/buttons in tasks pushed down

A thought.

Can one of the Asana team - @Marie @Katie @louis or others - give us some insight into how the Asanas are using Asana. You must use tasks and projects extensively in your own work, and no doubt have tasks with multiple projects, tags, custom fields.

How do you read those data efficiently without significant hunting and scrolling.
Keeping description fields short appears to be the ONLY way to become accustomed to this.
(4 months in, Iā€™m still struggling :frowning: )

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Hi @Tom_Sopwith! Youā€™re right, all our work is of course organized in Asana; personally, I have always relied on shortcuts, so whenever Iā€™m working on a task and need to access the project tab, Iā€™m using the ā€œTab+Pā€ shortcut to automatically focus on the project tab! If youā€™re not using yet, I highly recommend giving it a go :slight_smile:

In terms of UX design, the suggestion to use keyboard shortcuts is diametrically opposed to the idea of making the user interface simpler for users. Only users who are technically versed (a.k.a. ā€œpower usersā€) are using keyboard shortcuts. Therefore, the logic and stated reasoning for moving the projects off the visible viewport is flawed.

Second, the keyboard shortcuts only work for editing the values. They are not suitable for discovery. In most cases, a user does not want to change the values, but only find out and verify how a task is organized currently in a longer list of tasks. Initiating the editing interface with the keyboard shortcut breaks the userā€™s previous user interaction / navigation.

Our whole team is still complaining. All of our organization guests/customers working with us in Asana are still complaining. This single issue gives co-workers, partners, and customers who are opposed to Asana (or in favor of other products) a key argument into their hands.

Dear Asana, this is a great strategy to lose market share.

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Agreed.

We may as well lose the UI and go back to a CLI

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Hi all,
Iā€™m an amateur programmer and I created a Chrome extension named Asana Navigator to display the projects (+ section selector if any) on top of the task pane.
Iā€™m still on the half way through my to-do list, but I have implemented the ā€œminimum viableā€ features.
If you use Google Chrome, Iā€™d appreciate it very much if you could try it out and give me any feedback.
Thank you.

(Edit: I introduced a bug in version 1.1. Please wait for the fixed version 1.1.2 to be published on the Chrome Web Store.)

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Sure, I use TAB P and TAB T a ton while editing tasks, but the main issue weā€™ve been highlighting in this thread is when working between multiple tasks, reading and browsing them. The project(s) a task is in, and the tags applied are a really helpful part of the content of that task. They help us communicate with other teams, decide priority, understand context and associate information.

I absolutely :orange_heart: asana. It is hands down my favourite app I have ever used, for anything, ever.

There are very few shortcomings in asana that negatively impact my workflow. Of the few, this one is top of the list.

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My company has been evaluating project management solutions and due to this issue and the non-response to it have decided to move into another solution, Workfront. Asana simply doesnā€™t work for us, since thereā€™s literally no regard to our specific needs (nor the needs of so many other representatives on this thread). The transition likely wonā€™t happen for a few more months, due to currently being in a combination of four or more tools.

Asana has been and will continue to be a great tool for personal and small group use, but larger groups need the ability to customize workflows to suit their needs (as evidenced by the various testimonies of how they use Asana here), and Asana simply does not provide an adequate platform to do this.

My group has been paying for Asana for well over a year now and had, until these latest changes and the lack of acceptable response, intended to stick with it for a potentially much longer time with more and more of my team and peripheral teams being integrated. This is not the only reason weā€™ve decided to move to another tool, but it was the last in a long line of dominoes.

Side note: Iā€™ll probably keep using it for personal use, but I donā€™t pay for it thereā€¦

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I am an Asana power user and evangelist.
I recommend Asana to everyone.

  • At my old job, I led Asana onboarding training meetings customized to focus on the best features for each department.
  • I read the entire Asana guide and wrote my own tutorial document for my company, which was so popular that I made it a public google document for others to share.
  • I was the contact person whenever someone needed to troubleshoot a function.

Asana is one of the best things that ever happened to my workflow.

I am still miserable about this change.
The workarounds posted in this thread work fine for simple tasks, but on subtasks they hide the menu buttons at the top of the task. Very very annoying. But still less annoying than having to scroll down to see the project.

Especially since most of my tasks come through email at my new job.
Thanks to the crappy email formatting in Asana where all link text is doubled AND our lengthy corporate privacy language (ā€œThe contents of this email are confidential. blah blah blah.ā€) the project label rarely makes it above the fold on my tasks.

Itā€™s harder for me to recommend Asana to others after this UI change.
Projects are one of the game-changing features about Asana that other platforms struggle to match. Theyā€™re more important that boards. I donā€™t understand why you would bury this feature.

Maybe itā€™s time for a CSO?
https://adage.com/article/media/your-company-should-hire-a-chief-sanity-officer/314856/

"Consider the most annoying and exasperating stumbles of some high-profile new and newish companies over the past year and they all have to do with leaving consumers guessingā€”because of messed-up messaging, herky-jerky interface changes, ever-morphing strategies, and excessive course corrections.

Weā€™ve seen it with Snapchat. (This redesign makes everything better and easier! Please ignore the 1.2 million users who signed a Change.org petition begging for a reversal of the ā€œupdateā€ ā€¦ although eventually weā€™ll pay attention to it, but not before shedding 3 million active users in just one quarter.)"

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Agreed, managing support issues and detailed task descriptions in asana means that description fields can get hugeā€¦ Would appreciate if this UI fix could be done to make lives simpler.

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My team noticed that the project link is now below the description box, which is inefficient. sometimes thereā€™s long descriptions which forces the user to scroll down to the end of the description to see what project the task is in. It seems inefficient and wasteful to have moved it. Anyone else agree?

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Many of us agree. Join the conversation here.

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Agreed, managing support issues and detail task descriptions in asana means that descirption field can get hugeā€¦

Would appreciate if this UI fix could be done to make lives simpler.

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@Chris_Ball1 Please add your comments to the topic below. This is the one they are keeping an eye on.

@Marie, please merge.

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Thanks for flagging it @Vince_Mustachio, all merged!

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Itā€™s a double edged sword. If your users arenā€™t complaining, they arenā€™t using the product. I love working in IT?!?! :thinking:

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For me, itā€™s not so much the project name being below the description as much as it is the Project SECTION. Especially if youā€™re using sections to track status - like ā€œDoingā€ or ā€œQA Neededā€ etc. I know we can (and do) use custom fields for this sort of thing, but using sections was part of Asanaā€™s original DNA and still is used in some of our projects today.

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Yup. Just proof that if you ignore your users long enough, theyā€™ll simply go away. In every possible way.

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Asana? Still awaiting your replyā€¦

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Hi @Tim_Jasper and apologies for the delayed follow-up! Check out this post from our Product Manager in which he outlines the logic behind this change!

Every time someone new complains about this, you just link to that post. It doesnā€™t matter your logic behind it, it was a bad decision and a mistake. Either provide organizations the ability to configure how their usersā€™ Asana experience goes, or continue to lose users. As it is, my company is just a few months out of moving away from Asana, largely because of your inability to respond to organizational needs. We had previously planned to move another 3-4 dozen users into Asana by the end of the year, as we continued to expand our usage of it, and despite its many gigantic pitfalls as a task management tool for our organization. Now weā€™re moving away instead.

I canā€™t imagine there are too many individuals paying as much for Asana as there are organizations. So focus on individuals, make them happy, and bleed paying customers.

Good luck.

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