Hi all,
I’m a product manager here at Asana and I wanted to hop in and give some context on these changes and address some of your feedback. First, I want to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us. Having such an active community of users who love Asana and can give feedback on the changes we make is incredibly helpful as we work to improve Asana.
For these changes specifically, we recognize that they have felt jarring for many of you and we will take that into account as we roll out any future update. We could have done a better job communicating those changes, and we apologize for the frustration and confusion that they caused.
In all of these updates, our goal is to make it clearer for a user to understand what the information is in a task, when it needs to be completed, and how to complete it. Here’s some info on how we made decisions around the changes you’re seeing in Asana:
When we looked to simplify the top part of the Task Pane, we decided to include the actions that were taken most frequently by Asana users, which is how we landed on the following actions available in one click:
- Attaching files to a task
- Adding subtasks to a task
- Copying the task link URL to your clipboard
- Liking a task
We also saw through our research that many first time users of Asana are very confused about how to actually complete a task. Since this is one of the core actions that every user needs to be able to take to successfully manage their work with Asana, we wanted to be sure it was crystal clear how to complete work and keep projects moving forward. While the checkmark was definitely more space efficient and consistent with the rest of the app, updating to a “mark complete” button makes it clearer for everyone how to complete their tasks when they’re done. We have observed that first-time users find this action more intuitive in the adjusted layout, and we’re rolling it out so that each and everyone can easily adopt Asana, and contribute to the success of their team.
Lastly, we saw through user research that people generally want to get to the heart of task content ASAP, which is why we moved the placement of the project information below the task’s description. I understand from your feedback this is one of the most noticeable changes for many of you. While this definitely takes some relearning from one’s initial muscle memory (trust me, it took us a while to get used to it internally at Asana as well), we hope the pain caused by the change will decrease over time. As we tested and conducted research on this change, we’ve seen that it does make task info clearer for many users, especially among people who are brand new to Asana.
Because people can use Asana for so many different types of work, we often rely on data and product usage insights to guide decisions like this one. It’s inevitable that some Asana users, like many of you here, use different actions more frequently than others, and will have different desires for how Asana will work for their team. Change is never easy, and we don’t take these actions lightly. 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 the frustration this is causing. I recognize that many of you will still feel frustrated even after reading my response, and I want to personally ensure you that we’ll continue to look at all the feedback and take it into account as we make future changes. I hope this little bit of context helps you see where we’re coming from!