Concept Design

Asana Mobile App Redesign

Redesigning an app that allows users to stay on top of their day-to-day tasks and quickly collaborate with their team.

Scroll

Over the course of two weeks, our team worked to create a new feature and redesign an existing feature to meet Asana's business goals and user's expectations.

Asana is a project management tool that helps teams manage their tasks to ensure they hit their goals and make every project a success. Due to Covid-19, there has been a huge rise in adoption of remote work across various industries. This is one of the major drivers in the growth of project management software industry. 

THE SCOPE

Focus on the work that counts.

Asana is a Sanskrit word that refers to the place and pose in which a yogi sits.

A product that brings ease, focus, and flow to you, your team, and your work.

A pose requires marrying form and flow to stay centered while moving through distractions. Asana's founders chose this word for its name to describe what they set out to build:

Identifying Asana’s place in the market landscape.

The project management software industry market value is currently $6B and is projected to more than triple in 2032, reaching $20.5B.* However, it is also very saturated, with over 60 available options. During our research we identified that Trello, Basecamp, Jira, and Monday.com were the most common competitive platforms that users are engaging with. 

THE DISCOVERY

*Source: Future Market Insights, Project Management Software Market Outlook (2022-2032)

Through a competitive analysis, we evaluated the competitor’s strategies and features to understand their strength and weaknesses relative to Asana’s product offering.

Takeaways:

  • All platforms had similar features such as boards, timelines, calendars, task management lists, and integrations

  • Some products had the ability to assign a task to more than one user, which Asana cannot do 

  • The mobile apps differed in functionality, but the majority had limited features available

  • Jira had a feature called “Forms” that helped gather input from various stakeholders during different phases of the project 

  • Comparative tools like Slack and Google Sheets make is easy for teams to share ideas and provide feedback

Understanding user habits.

Key findings, identified through 14 user surveys, helped identify key insights around why they use project management tools and what they like or dislike about these tools.

86%

of respondents use project management software for work

are the top used features across PM platforms

are the most used apps across respondents

Easy, simple, affordable

are the top three words describing user’s experience with PM tools

Asana & Trello

Task mgmt., progress reporting, & team calendars

Diving deeper into user behaviors.

To gain further insight of who users are and what users do, we interviewed nine Project Management Software users. This helped us understand how users currently use project management tools and what they want from this product.

  • Users are not engaging with the mobile app, only the desktop version

  • Users like templates that show you how to organize items and what information to capture

  • Users need to start the project planning process outside the project management software in other locations such as Google Sheets, email chains, or Slack

  • Users typically work off of an assigned task or to-do list in the calendar or timeline view; uses this like a daily agenda to structure their day

  • The tool is helpful for managers or project management champions to oversee team, keep them accountable, report on progress or any blockers, and run team meetings

  • Users were interested in seeing quick calendar views or lists of upcoming tasks on the mobile app to plan their day/week

  • Users would like there to be reminders or notifications when something hasn't been updated in a while or overdue 

  • Users like fresh, new, and simplistic user interfaces

Although users typically use the desktop version during the work hours for their day-to-day task management, we focused on how we could add value to increase adoption of Asana’s mobile app, as it is currently limited.

Through analysis of our research, we identified common goals, needs, and frustrations that allowed us to developed our primary persona, Simon.

DEFINING THE USER PERSONA

A peek into Simon’s week.

To better understand the perspective of the user, we created a journey map for Simon. By mapping out Simon’s actions, thoughts, and feeling, we were able to identify problems or challenges he was facing when using a project management tool. This informed the design decisions and helped ensure the design was meeting users’ needs.

I found that creating the journey map helped facilitate team collaboration. It allowed us to share insights, brainstorm potentially improvement areas together, and align on our objectives before jumping into design activities.

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

Simon needs a way to start planning for a project with his team and quickly report on overall progress so that they can have a transparent source of truth to collaborate with teammates.

THE PROBLEM

To generate and explore ideas for solving this problem, we formed How Might We questions to consider.

How Might We…

  • Familiarize team members with a project to collaborate on the plan? 

  • Create a space that teams can use for the full scope of the project?

  • Allow team managers to report on all team members’ completed and upcoming tasks?

  • Allow teams to run meetings efficiently using the tool?

  • Encourage users to use the mobile app when on the go?

From ideation to design.

After discussing a wide range of potential solutions to explore, we prioritized design ideas that were the most relevant, useful, and usable for users.

One of the differentiators of Asana is that it offers the majority of its features for free for up to 15 members. With that in mind we designed both of our new features with the focus being on use by larger teams implementing these features, which would encourage more subscriptions for the paid enterprise version of Asana.

We began by each sketching variations of the two solutions. We used the sketches to discuss our design ideas and align on what features we should move forward with for wireframing.

Our design reinforces Asana's goals and our user's desire for: ease, simplicity, and focus.

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

Solution 1: Project Planning

New Feature

Solution 2: Team Task Calendar

Revised Feature

Current State

  • Projects can only be planned through assigning tasks

Competitive Analysis

  • Trello offers a collaborate board to share ideas

User Interviews

  • Project planning tends to begin outside of Asana in other platforms such as Slack & Google Sheets

The Rationale

Current State

  • Inability to change project calendar to show whole team or individual tasks to check status

Competitive Analysis

  • Competitors offer filter features on calendar view

User Interviews

  • No reminders or follow ups if a task is overdue

The Rationale

Designed by Freepik

THE DESIGN

THE FLOWS

1

The Project Planning feature provides teams with a space to brainstorm and collaborate for upcoming activities by using a whiteboard or preset templates.

2

The Team Calendar feature allows users to quickly view their personal or their team’s tasks, select a date range to view, and comment on items to find out more information.

THE FEEDBACK

We conducted two rounds of usability testing to gather feedback on ease of use and effectiveness. We collected qualitative and quantitative results to identify issues that users had with the app and gather suggestions for improvements.

Users were given two tasks to complete.

(1) You want to create a new project space on the Asana mobile app in order to put together a plan for how you and your team will conduct a newly assigned project.

(2) Once the project is created you want to view the calendar to track the progress of your team's tasks.

Assumption: You already have an Asana account

Round 1: Functionality

The majority of feedback we received during round one was focused on ease of navigation…or lack there of. We identified some key changes that could improve our users experience with the app.

1

Make icons more prominent or clear (i.e. create new project, add template, comment, add team member)

2

Make it easier to fill out notes template by tapping to add text

3

Improve filter dropdown location and functionality

4

Remove calendar view filter and enable selection directly on calendar

Round 2: Look and feel.

After the second round of usability testing the time it took to complete both tasks decreases and the ease of use and value scores improved, confirming that we addressed some of the issues found during the first round of testing.

1

Expand clickable areas

2

Provide guidance on how to use the calendar selector

THE BACKLOG

We prioritized the user feedback by how many people mentioned it and how complex it was to implement.

Items to consider down the road.

Ability to add multiple team members to project at once

Add the “add template” button to the project menu

Make notes template expandable as user adds content

Enable ability to capture owners against milestones

Filter by different or multiple team members in the calendar view

Enable a push notification feature for upcoming tasks

Click away!

THE PROTOTYPE

Previous
Previous

Happy Marlo Mobile App Design

Next
Next

Ginkgo Gardens Ecommerce Redesign