Status Updates

creating reports that write themselves by connecting them to the work

  • I led the design of this product, which built on an existing product feature to kick off a more robust vision of reporting at Asana. I worked in close partnership with my Product Manager and Tech Lead, and I managed collaboration with a variety of stakeholders including product & executive leadership, the design systems team, and other senior designers as I created new interaction patterns that would be used as the foundation for future features by other teams.

    • Cross-functional leads

    • 4-6 engineers

Overview


Our users work was live in Asana, but providing updates on the status of that work to teammates and leaders wasn’t straightforward and many users were exporting their Asana data into other tools to report on. This created additional work to do the work, and the outputs were often outdated with no link to their source material.

To solve this, my team & I spent time with our users to see how they were creating their reports, what those reports looked like, and we spent time speaking to folks on the receiving end of reports to better understand what they wanted to see.

From this, we were able to create an easy to use builder that starts a user out with a “best practices” template that is easily configurable. We created draggable blocks to make it easy to reference the work, whether that’s a series of tasks or a chart, and we also added in little details like timestamps to create clarity about the status of work at a moment in time.

This resulted in an increase in use of status updates across the board along with qualitative feedback from our users that they were delighted with the new experience. This project also set the groundwork for future reporting launches and created the WYSIWYG editor framework that was later used in features such as project overviews

You can read more about status updates and tracking progress at Asana here.

Placing this work in context

This was the first in a suite of reporting offerings I designed during my time at Asana.

Why’d we start here?

  • Covered a large set of reporting use cases

  • Replaced an existing product surface area

  • Huge 0-1 lift in saving users time in sharing the status of their work

Product details

  • Self updating reports

  • Allowed curating & sharing data at a point in time

  • Canvas background/interface

  • WYSIWYG editor

Learnings & impact for future products

  • It helped the team develop our principle of starting users with best practices

  • It created a product precedent of progress updates that link to the work they reference

  • We were able to learn how users thought about their work relative to time

  • It created an engineering data model for freezing or referencing data at a point in time

Product Overview

We created draggable blocks that would auto-populate with the relevant work and information

…which we updated to include visualizations as soon as we built the capability into the product

The task and visualization blocks users brought in would remain in the template for next time, while updating to reflect the latest data

We started users with a template utilizing best practices from our research across the industry to help them create useful updates

and we collected updates into a scrollable modal so it was easy to understand the history and current state of any project

Impact

For our users

“I've just seen this update, and let me start off by saying — just seeing this update has blown me away! I didn't know what exactly I really wanted to make using Status Reporting easier, but your team created and delivered something really creative.”

— Asana user

For our metrics

  • 21% increase in the number of users creating status updates

  • 27% increase in the number of domains using status updates

  • A net increase of 8% of total volume of status updates

  • A 4.5% increase in the number of projects that have updates