Universal Reporting

helping teams achieve clarity by providing real-time information across projects

  • I led the product design of this product, from initial user research and scope definition to final assets. I managed collaboration with a variety of stakeholders including product & executive leadership, the design systems team, and other senior designers as I built upon or created new interaction patterns that had ramifications for the rest of the product.

    • Cross-functional leads

    • 4-6 engineers

Overview

Companies were keeping all of their work in Asana, but there was no way for leaders to get visibility across all of it in the ways that mattered to them. We wanted our users to have actionable, real-time data to drive clarity and planning and reveal the power of Asana’s work graph.

Placing this work in context

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

I worked on a team known as Insights, which was formed in 2019 based on company needs & priorities for the next year. Asana uses something called VoC (Voice of the Customer), which reflects the needs of our users, to create the company roadmap. Those needs are weighed against business needs and market opportunities to come up with a ranked list of company priorities. Work Reporting was #2 on that list.

To kick off this work, the team did a lot of exploratory research. On the product side, we researched competitive products, interviewed users and compiled information on the what, where and why of our users current reporting. As part of this, we gathered over fifty reports that our users were creating in other tools to understand the stories they were trying to tell, the data they were trying to understand, and how they wanted to act on it (if at all). In addition to meeting with leaders creating and sharing reports with stakeholders — we met with their bosses. We met with the recipients of reports to understand how they were parsing the information they were given, what they actually wanted to see, and what would enable them to most effectively support those reporting into them.

This research also included investigations by our engineers into our data models to understand the difficulties we might encounter and to understand potential reporting frameworks and libraries we might implement.

This formulated the vision for the first 2 years of Reporting at Asana, and from this we created the above roadmap of features that would enable us to provide value to our users quickly while iteratively building in the foundations we’d need for later launches. Because of this, by the time we kicked off this project we had a strong foundation of user knowledge and design patterns to build from.

we set out to Fulfill the pyramid of Clarity for Molly

Molly represents (and was the actual name of) a Team Lead — one of our user types at Asana. This is someone who currently manages multiple projects and is often leveraging multiple tools, including those outside of Asana, to monitor and share out how their work is going. They were frustrated because they couldn’t easily check or share the state of their work in Asana with other stakeholders and were left to tedious processes, like exporting data and importing it elsewhere to create visualizations. Even when they used outside tools, the information quickly became out of date and was removed from the ability to take action. Our previous launches had solved some of these pains, but Molly still couldn’t report on work across Asana’s varying containing structures, even though the product encouraged users to cross-link work utilizing the Work Graph.

Because we had a base of knowledge from our prior launches, our primary questions going into this product process where:

Where

Where does this fit within the product? How do we avoid unnecessary navigational bloat while ensuring the placement makes sense in the product hierarchy and is easily accessible to our users?

How

We were allowing users to report on all data in Asana, regardless of container or location. How do we make it easy for users to create helpful visualizations and select the right information to report on?

With whom

A primary use case of this type of reporting is share-ability. How do we make this easily shareable to the right folks while navigating different levels of access to the underlying data?

Where

During the time that we were strategizing and spec-ing out Universal Reporting, the company as a whole was thinking about way-finding, information architecture and organization. Another new product area, Goals, had recently been launched and teams were re-thinking the utility of other product areas such as Home and My Tasks. We wanted to make sure the entry point for Universal Reporting made sense within the current product paradigm and going forward and wouldn’t add unnecessary bloat or confusion to the navigation.

I held collaboration & brainstorm sessions with designers and product leads from other areas thinking about navigation or building related products. This, in addition to our own user research, led us to the conclusion that Universal Reporting should be its own navigational item because 1) that was most intuitive to our users and 2) as a data object it didn’t belong to any existing containers.

How

While we knew the types of information Molly wanted to report on, we didn’t fully understand the how. We found that alternative products that enabled total customization were overwhelming and led users to create bad visualizations that didn’t accurately reflect the underlying data, but we also knew that products that only offered preset charts weren’t flexible enough to meet the varied needs of many users. Through iteration and user feedback, we landed on a solution that allowed users to get going quickly with predefined charts but also allowed customizability. We limited the parameters of our customization to make sure our users were creating good charts that correctly reflected the underlying data to provide clarity to everyone.

With whom

How do we provide clarity at scale while respecting privacy?

A complexity we identified at the beginning of the project is that the privacy expectations for Universal Reporting fell outside of the domain of our existing product privacy constructs. It wasn’t clear what level of access would be intended or given if a user shared a reporting dashboard with another stakeholder.

To solve this — I designed a few possible privacy scenarios then we met with users to learn more about their expectations, assumptions and desires for privacy and consistency. Through this we found that users expected others to see the same visualizations they shared, as they shared them. We empowered our users to do this while restricting access on click through for private data. This enabled a shared source of clarity for all stakeholders, while still maintaining the privacy of underlying data.

Impact

For our users

“The cross project visibility is a game changer.”

“It’s going to help us tell better stories as to why the work we’re performing matters.”

“Thanks to Asana’s ability to monitor progress across projects, it’s possible to predict your projects' delivery dates with outstanding precision. Through this, I am able to give practical answers and precise delivery dates to those who commission the projects.”

For our metrics

9.8% of domains had at least one user visiting a dashboard 3d28

We saw a strong increase in the Clarity and Align North Star Metrics during the second week after the marketing moment, with an increase in Healthy Align domains of +3.7% (at any point over the week), and +2.1% of Healthy Clarity domains. This was despite some public holidays in countries with a significant portion of Asana customers.

Additional

This work and launch created the ability to report on Goals — another new product offering from Asana. By creating reusable frameworks that could be implemented in Goals, and by collaborating with designers on that team throughout the process, they were later able to incorporate reporting into Goals.

Goals is now a top rated OKR product, largely due to its ability to use reporting across the Work Graph to achieve alignment and clarity.