When does this roll out to business plan users?
Hi Larry,
I’ll keep it brief, as I see from the consensus in the thread that this is a ‘fight’ we are going to lose – the minimalist new UX is carved in stone at this stage.
In our 25-person shop, the devs and designers primarily use My Tasks and Inbox, and the CEO uses Portfolios as a kind of dashboard view. The three PMs on the other hand use the full sidebar in order to have rapid access to our 200 or so active boards. Depending on the needs of the Team, we hand-curate the order of boards in the sidebar list to be alphabetical (projects, hosting), chronological (time-bound operations), or ‘whatever we need’ (executive).
The key benefit to the PMs of accessing all projects from the sidebar is that we do not need to ‘drill down’ and ‘back up’ again as we would with a portfolio or search that populates the content area of the screen. It is way more efficient for us to have one-click side-bar based switching from project to project.
A secondary benefit is that the sidebar offers a panopticon view of all 200 boards in a scannable list, giving a kind of situational awareness that is lost when the sidebar is treated as strictly a minimalist navigation interface with short automatically curated lists.
All of the solutions and work-arounds offered involve losing the ‘one click switching’ and situational awareness benefits of the old Asana sidebar.
We will deeply miss the ability to organize our work in a way that is perfect for our scale and workflows. For us, and I suspect for many others at our scale the new UX is a significantly degraded UX.
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Thanks for writing up the use cases, and glad to see that KB over in Slack has already shared your feedback with the product team.
If you are forced to change, or in case you hadn’t already ruled out, I’ll offer workarounds that might not have been provided yet or specified in enough detail to be clear. But recognize I’m not trying to talk you out of your request, just to offer potential options to consider.
For one-click access: For me, nothing is faster than autocomplete in the Search box (not searching with Advanced search, just autocomplete at the top of any page) for true, one-click access that I’d argue is faster than the sidebar, and enables more screen real estate and focus (I generally have the sidebar closed). If you can make this work for you for all or a good portion of your one-click needs, it could be worth it. You may want to consider your project naming conventions to better enable autocomplete filtering with the first few letters, seeing choices to choose or filter further.
For situational awareness: A project index (project of projects) would give your more flexibility than the sidebar. If you made one or more templates that did nothing more but to multi-home a single task identifying the project into a “project index” project, that could avoid extra overhead to make this resource available. Every one of your 200+ projects would have a single task (at the bottom, say) multi-homed into the project index. You could embellish with custom fields to enable more flexible use if desired. You could have more than one project index if helpful.
Hope that helps,
Larry
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The big issue with that is “advanced Search” is not available to free members, so finding a project as a free user is painstaking.
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Hi
The new sidebar is amazing
But i cant find the option to change the sidebar color to light
when i go to : From your avatar/profile > My Settings > Display > Theme set to ‘Light’ > i don’t have “sidebar & topbar color” like on this video :
Theme is set to light, is there anything else i should do to be able to set sidebar to light ?
thank you for your help
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Hi @CharlesV , welcome to the forum 
Glad you are enjoying the new sidebar! However, I don’t think it has rolled out completely and therefore perhaps the Light theme might not be available yet for your account.
Perhaps @Marie can help us out here?
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Correct! The redesign comes up with multiple updates, and not all these updates have shipped yet, so that is expected @CharlesV 
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So are predefined saved search is just no longer a thing? I’m not sure if I am missing something. This has been a really helpful tool for us.
The “flyout panel” to view projects within teams is a major disappointment. Losing the option to expand, collapse and organize is extremely frustrating. Asana had been near perfect for so long. Please make it an option to go back to the old way…
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Agree - I did not know they were going live (did not opt in to test this) and I hate it. I too use “teams” and “projects” to manage a very large, complex workload so not seeing things on the left and having to work harder is not ideal. I really do not like the update.
Can we get the option to keep the old???
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@Jay_Richards , @Lisa_Parziale , sorry to hear you feel this way about the new redesign.
I don’t work for Asana, but I’m fairly certain that being able to retain the old sidebar will not be an option unfortunately.
@Jay_Richards , welcome to the forum
You can still organize your projects within the Team’s page by dragging them up/down. This will be reflected in the flyout panel.
@Lisa_Parziale , the ‘Projects’ section is actually new and I personally find it very intuitive, better than frequently searching for projects within Teams. However, I think you may be missing your old ‘Favorites’ section which has now been renamed to ‘Starred’ in which you can organise/sort your starred projects, teams or other items, as you like, just like before.
Hope this help you adapt to this change…
Hi @Sara_Westland , the predefined searches have been removed from the sidebar, however they were simply links to search results which you can easily replicate by carrying out your own search and then 
the results page to add it to your Starred list of items.
Note, that most of them are located under ‘Saved searches’ when you click into the Search bar (at the bottom of the list):
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Thanks @Richard_Sather - I can have 25-50 active projects going at the same time (web developer and SEO) so the teams helped me quickly scan and find a project as I organized them under teams (Graphic Design, Logo Design, Web Design, Writing, SEO, etc.). Unfortunately, starred does not help as it is just one long list.
Having the ability to even just have the teams have drop-downs like they used to would solve the problem for me. I now have to click on each team. I also find it almost impossible now to drag and drop things like I used to. Guess I was one of the folks that absolutely loved Asana as it was.
Wish I had seen the beta opportunity - would have loved to influence this.
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Thanks @Lisa_Parziale , I’m glad you found my guide useful
Apologies, I may have misunderstood that you were looking for your projects that used to be in your Favorites section, now named Starred.
Your projects should still all appear within your Teams as they used to, but instead of expanding them within each team, you can access the flyout menu (which lists all the projects within that team) by clicking on the 
arrow on the right of the team’s name. This is the closest to the ‘dropdowns’ that you describe, i.e. ‘expanded’ Teams.
By clicking on the Team’s name (not the arrow) will take you to the Team’s page were you can sort the order of your projects, like you did within the old sidebar when you expanded your Team and sorted the list of projects there.
Hope that helps!
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It helps - but I was referring to dragging and dropping tasks from one project to another. Was much easier when we had the expandable sidebar. I think taking that away was a mistake.
I just need time to get used to this I suppose. I am a creature of habit.
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Glad to help, but I don’t think this was ever possible with the old sidebar.
Do you perhaps mean being able to drag & drop Projects from one Team into another? If so, yes that is unfortunately no longer possible. I’m guessing it was deemed such an infrequent action (and dangerous, I have had several accidents in the past by clients doing so) that Asana has decided the only way to move a project to another team is only from the project’s action menu.
This is unfortunate as my team would often migrate tasks from one project/team to another by dragging and dropping.
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