Asana,
The value of UX is being able to understand user flows. What’s that? If you actually chart the path of users on the application, you will see them break down into categories. If you have 1M users, you don’t have 1M categories. Depending upon how you look at (or what you’re looking for), you may have 5. Or 7.
These similar patterns are personified into what User Experience Designers call personas. The value of working with personas, instead of just raw data, is that you are able to draw better conclusions from the information you collect.
Harvest or Monday might be great for teams, but lousy for individual users. Jira might be widely adopted by developers, but it’s awful when trying to communicate to interdisciplinary teams.
I’ve suggested two things to Asana, that have still not been implemented or, to my knowledge, scheduled.
- Make individual tiles in the board view colorizable, and
- Make the left hand panel or dashboard customizable in so far as you can remove items that you do not use. For example, if you don’t use Portfolios, you would be able to remove it from view. Don’t like the clutter of seeing things that are not on your docket, remove them.
Of course, this last one is in opposition to constantly placing an upsell in front of people faces. But that is, in itself an outdated idea. And not just in my opinion. I am sure any of you can Google how ineffective (if not insulting) it is to constantly market to people at the bottom of a funnel. Once a person gets to an inner circle, they shouldn’t have to see adverts or CTA’s that are appropriate to new users or warm prospects.
It’s called segmenting. And that is what Asana is not doing by maintaining a non-customizable UI. This rigidity shows the the C-suite is not thinking about how a persona uses its product, but how large groups of people are moving through it.
UX can be very illuminating when team takes the time to sincerely have a look. The perspective of UX Development takes it even further and breaks down barriers between interdisciplinary departments to include the concepters, tech leads, and codebase specialists.
Warmly,
Dylan Nirvana