Thoughts on Asana's iPhone application

After playing a bit with Asana today, I decided to try out the iPhone application as well. While it's nice overall, there are a couple of points that I thought would deserve to be improved.

General impression

At first, I was a bit disoriented using the application. It does not follow the standard interface guidelines of other iPhone apps, which can be both a good and a bad thing. 

Asana's app home screen:

For instance, there is no "back" button at the top left when looking at a task list or at a single task. Of course, it's quite easy to go back to those pages by tapping on the left of the screen, but this leads to the second remark: the current interface wastes a bit of space of an already small screen estate.

The task list does not use the full available screen real estate:

An iPhone screen only offers so much space to display information, and the app insists on not using the full available height and width to display the information on the page at hand. As a result, it can be tough to make out the name of a task from the task list screen.

Screen-by-screen remarks

I noted a couple additional things while trying out the app.

The tag list doesn't display how many tags are associated to each tag...

Leading the user to tap to see an empty tag page:

Task pages feature a "More" button...

That only gives access to one additional "Delete Task" button:

Conclusion

It feels like the current version of Asana's iPhone application is a first try at building something cool, and, as such, it's still a bit rough around the edges.

Important note: I like the app very much, which is why I went into the business of being nitty-picky to begin with. Given the care given to the UX of the web app, I was actually surprised to find these (admittedly small) issues in the iPhone app.

Posting to Asana from XWiki

I've been working on a code snippet allowing to create a task in Asana from XWiki with the help of @ldubost.

It allows an user to create a new task in an Asana workspace right from a wiki page in XWiki. As of right now it's quite rough, but it shows interesting potential.

I can think of several use cases:
  • Many people use XWiki to store procedures, handling their validation workflow using Asana would be pretty neat
  • The integration would be great to help people coordinate around the writing of sales proposals, especially complex ones
  • Thinking ahead, the integration would be useful pretty much anytime a group of people has to work collaboratively on editing a document in the wiki. Given XWiki's ability to create structured documents, the possibilities are endless (and, yes, that was one my first blog posts on the XWiki blog).
Going further, you could map users, workspaces and projects in Asana with users, workspaces and spaces in XWiki, then display all your current tasks for a given project in a panel displayed on the right of the matching wiki space. Users could switch back and forth seamlessly between knowing who's supposed to do what (in Asana) and the actual work of creating and updating documents online (in XWiki). Time go go back coding...