Too much Noise
I agree with your answer in principal, but I think the presumption still needs to change. As itās only follow-up notifications that weāre talking about, which can still be opt-ed out of (i.e. unfollow). In my mind, the beautiful difference between Asana & Email is the ability to leave the room (i.e. unfollow). Which is driven by the Asana user, rather than the email replier (which we canāt control).
This issue is in the assumption:
The issue here is that every member of our team expected to be a collaborator, and have been caught out as a result. Obviously, had we glanced we wouldāve seen the button said āfollowā, indicating the oppositeā¦ but we didnāt. And thatās the crux of my argument.
For software to be intuitive, it needs to follow what āmakes senseā to the users. And for our SME, 100% of our team (of varying levels of Asana fluency) were surprised that they were not collaborators in this instance, meaning they missed all the subsequent banter/photos on the conversation.
If other SME teams are making this same assumption, then this issue will be experienced by them too. Perhaps they donāt even realize, as we didnāt until a big verbal discussion on a particular topic made it obvious people had missed out on followup comments/posts.
Why did our team assume we were Collaborators?
I believe our team assumed that we were collaborators because of the nature of how Tasks function. If the notification had been a fledgling task; the fact that we were in the initial notification, indicates that we are a collaborator, and would still be notified of any developments unless we purposefully chose to unfollow+archive.
Some of our team were especially aggrieved that they had Liked the conversation, and not become a collaborator of it. However, to tie the Following to a Like would be counter-intuitive to how we deal with Tasks, so donāt think this can be the solution!
Note; to deal with this situation, an Asana user has to be fluent enough to easily identify that the notification is a Conversation, not a Task. Which is a hurdle in itself, and any users of low exposure are definitely not going to deal with this correctly.
Conversations Training
The suggestion you make about training staff to identify Conversations separately from Tasks and follow them all ājust in caseā is a real solution, acknowledge that. Would work if you could educate teams to whats happening here. But honestly, its a little technical, and not everyone understood what we were talking about when we spoke as a team about this issue.
Chalk this one us as not enough value in the training, especially considering weāll get new staff every other month meaning that the training never stops.