Hi all,
Iām 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.
Iām still on the half way through my to-do list, but I have implemented the āminimum viableā features.
If you use Google Chrome, Iād 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.)
Sure, I use TAB P and TAB T a ton while editing tasks, but the main issue weāve 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 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.
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 doesnāt work for us, since thereās literally no regard to our specific needs (nor the needs of so many other representatives on this thread). The transition likely wonāt 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 weāve decided to move to another tool, but it was the last in a long line of dominoes.
Side note: Iāll probably keep using it for personal use, but I donāt pay for it thereā¦
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 (āThe contents of this email are confidential. blah blah blah.ā) the project label rarely makes it above the fold on my tasks.
Itās 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. Theyāre more important that boards. I donāt understand why you would bury this feature.
"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 guessingābecause of messed-up messaging, herky-jerky interface changes, ever-morphing strategies, and excessive course corrections.
Weāve 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 āupdateā ā¦ although eventually weāll pay attention to it, but not before shedding 3 million active users in just one quarter.)"
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.
My team noticed that the project link is now below the description box, which is inefficient. sometimes thereās 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?
For me, itās not so much the project name being below the description as much as it is the Project SECTION. Especially if youāre using sections to track status - like āDoingā or āQA Neededā etc. I know we can (and do) use custom fields for this sort of thing, but using sections was part of Asanaās original DNA and still is used in some of our projects today.
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 doesnāt 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 weāre moving away instead.
I canāt 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.
Well said. I also think tailoring the UI experience only for new users is not necessarily the best. New users can be trained. Power users need to be able to get to their data quickly, preferably ā at a glance.
My company has been struggling with this UI change ever since it was launched and we just canāt get used to it. This is a massively counterproductive design that is interfering with our flow every single day. In the past 4 years weāve been using Asana projects to indicate so many things on tasks, and we have tasks with long descriptions. Scrolling through descriptions to know basic stuff like whether the task was added to a teamās board or was tagged as important is not only cumbersome, it moves away the information most important to us (e.g. how urgent the task is) away from the eye.
I see now that people have been complaining all the way through from April, itās not giving me much hope.
Louis, I found this post rather late, after multiple months of struggling with this design change. I can say for my team that not only weāre not getting used to the project list being located below the description - for most of us itās getting more and more frustrating every day.
I understand your motives for moving the project list downwards, itās a cleaner design and might help some users focus. However we originally chose Asana more than 4 years ago because it fitted our philosophy of tagging everything with multiple contexts - e.g. a task can be part of a teamās sprint/board, it can also be a bug with a given priority, it can also be part of a productās backlogā¦ Asana was the best tool at the time to naturally express this flow of work.
The change that you did goes directly against this philosophy, because itās now considerably less visible whatās the status of a task using its projects. As a development leader, the first things Iām looking for are the task status indicators: what boards is it on (and in what section - in development? stuck due to something? waiting to be tested?), was it assigned some indication of being urgent (we use colored projects for that) and so on. This crucial metadata on a task is now in a place I can never expect - it can be right in front of my eyes (if the description is short) or require lengthy scrolling. It might even be easy to miss in the case of tasks with both a lengthy description and many comments.
Additionally, Iād like to point your attention to the fact that adding tasks to various projects is almost the only way users in Asana can add metadata beyond the built-in ones (complete/incomplete, assignee, dateā¦). (There are custom fields, but theyāre not powerful enough to express basic task metadata IMHO.)
You now created a situation where the built-in task metadata and custom fields are in one place, and the rest of the metadata - the most powerful one I can customize as a user - is in a different place. It made way more sense to have all the taskās metadata in one place to peek at, then the details (description, subtasks, comments) below.
@louis I understand that you guys need to take new users into consideration but it is dangerous if a tool meant to run your ālifeā becomes less efficient for power users.
Speaking of which, I hardly use the visual menu bar to format text because I use shortcuts but that wouldnāt be the case with new users for whom the text formatting menu is more relevant and yet it disappears (stuck at the bottom) when the description gets too long.
asana. It is hands down my favourite app I have ever used, for anything, ever.