Asana is one of the leading team task management tools. In the report we did last fall, Asana was in the top tier of four apps, and it’s killer feature was its three pane model for task organization: projects on the left, lists of task in the middle, and the specific task selected on the right.

Here’s the task pane as I saw it this morning, just before I accepted the transition to a new look and feel:

and after accepting the change:

The big change is along the top area of the task pane. In the new version, the critical metadata are all found at the top — assigned, due date, subtasks, tags, attachments, ‘like’ — instead of spread across the pane. Note the keyboard shortcut in the tooltip for tags, which according to Asana has increased the use of shortcuts greatly.

This is more noticeably minimal in a task with less metadata:

The folks at Asana have also reworked the way that comments within a task are displayed, most importantly putting the avatars of users participating in the task at the bottom near the comment editor box, instead of at the top of the comment region.

The Bottom Line

When I was working in programming tools, like compilers, we would try hard to optimize code being generated. But we waited until we had passed a lot of programs through the compilers, and then we’d decide where to put our time and energy. One general finding from that discipline is that you do well to optimize the code in the most nested loops, because that is the code that runs the most.

The place that people spend the most time in when using task management tools — the most nested code — is looking at and modifying information on the task pane. Any improvements there have an inordinate impact on usability. My sense if that Asana has nailed it with this reformulation, and they have killed it again with their killer feature.