Meet the new Asana

We’re so excited to share with you what we’ve been working on for the last several months. Our goal at Asana is to empower teams to do great things together. And today, we’re a step closer to that goal, with the new Asana. For a more in-depth look at the news, watch the video of our press event.

Why a new Asana?

Teams of people coming together to achieve a shared goal—this is what drives most of human achievement. Yet, the logistics of working together are still extremely difficult. Even with solutions like email, group messaging, and shared documents, the basic questions you have on your team still aren’t answered. What are the next steps to accomplish your goal? Who is doing them, and by when? We created Asana to help teams have clarity on questions like these.

And in the three and a half years since we launched, we’ve made significant progress. Teams across the globe in every industry—from fast-growing tech companies like Pinterest and Uber, to organizations like the United Way and NASA, to global brands like Disney and Verizon—use Asana to achieve more than they could before. But there’s more opportunity to make work even easier for you. So, after countless customer conversations, user experience studies, and prototypes, we built a new Asana.

What’s new

Asana is a powerful product with a lot of features, and in the old Asana it could feel overwhelming to get started with your team. To fix that, the product needed some big changes. In fact, the number one request from customers was an improved design. The new Asana is redesigned to make tracking work to completion easier, so teams can get on board quickly and use Asana to achieve their goals.

A simple, clear experience

Now, when you start using Asana, it’s simple. Advanced features unfold gradually, only when you need them.

It’s clearer where to start and how to find the information you want. The new top bar highlights the features you need to stay on top of your day (My Tasks) and see what’s happening with the work you care about (My Inbox). The Quick Add button lets you add tasks, projects, and conversations from anywhere in the product.

When you go to a project, you’ll see a cleaner, more skimmable list of tasks. The improved project navigation gives you access to everything you need to drive your project to success: a calendar of upcoming milestones, a high-level view of your progress and status, and a beautiful gallery of all the files in that project. You can also see the conversations you’re having with the project team—but we’ll get to that in a minute.

There’s clear, consistent information hierarchy throughout, so you can quickly scan a page for the important information. And the sidebar, your jumping off point to your complete list of teams and projects, can slip away with a click, so you can focus on the work at hand.

Calming with pops of energy

The new Asana is designed to give you a feeling of calm and focus (ahhh…). When you first start a project, it looks like a simple sheet of crisp, white paper. But as you work, elements animate and light up in delightful ways (oooh…). When you complete tasks and get results with your team, Asana celebrates with you—and sometimes a flying unicorn does too.

Actionable conversations

We’ve also added new features that help your team move work forward. Before, you could just have conversations on a specific task. Now you can have conversations with everyone who’s working on a project with you, or with all the members of a team.

But what makes Asana Conversations really special is that you can create tasks directly from these conversations—unlike email, where action items often get lost in the noise. Tasks created from conversations are linked to those conversations forever. This means anyone can look back and see the original discussion (unless you’ve made it private, of course). In Asana everything is actionable, so you don’t just talk about the work—you get it done.

When to use Asana Conversations:

Never use an internal mailing list again. Use Project Conversations to have project-level discussions—when brainstorming ideas, discussing roadblocks, shifting resources, or any other topic that goes beyond a single task. Use Team Conversations to share team-wide announcements, celebrate major accomplishments, or talk about multiple projects at a time.

By having conversations in Asana, you get all sorts of benefits over mailing lists:

• Public Asana Conversations are easily discoverable, even to teammates who weren’t on the original thread. No need to forward old emails to your new teammates anymore to give them context.

• You can follow and unfollow conversations and add or remove followers, instead of being stuck on a cc list for life. (We’ve all been there…)

• You can link directly to a conversation from any other piece of work in Asana. It’s much easier to share information compared to forwarding or replying-all.

Easier onboarding

It can be a challenge to get an entire team to switch their habits and tools. So, throughout our entire redesign process, we tried to keep “beginner’s mind.” We updated Asana to be more intuitive for new users. The clearer layout and improved navigation helps teammates know where to go and what to do first. We added an interactive tour to get new users oriented and ready to collaborate right away. And Team Pages are a new hub for your team’s projects, conversations, and calendar, giving new teammates an unintimidating way to get a bird’s eye view of everything related to your Team.

Learn more about all of these changes on the Guide.

And how about that logo!

The new Asana is a fundamental evolution of our product, and with it, we’re launching a new logo and brand. Our new logo represents teams doing great things together. We still have our 3 dots, but now they are rearranged to represent 3 members of a team, working together with a glow of energy to unite them. To learn more about the logo evolution process, read this post from Asana’s Head of Design.

Up next: speed

Performance is our top priority, and we’ve already made sure that significant portions of the new Asana are written in our new framework, Luna2. Once the entire product is converted, we’ll see radically improved performance, especially for our largest organizations. A speedier Asana experience is right around the corner.

TL;DR

The new Asana is the easiest way to track work, and get results

The new Asana is clear. It gives you focus, it gives you energy, and we think it will make your team smile. Most importantly, it helps you track your work from start to finish, so your team can get great results.  

You can check it out on web, Android, and iOS today. We hope you  it.