Asana's $5B onboarding has a basic UX problem

All right guys, welcome to another teardown.

So this time we're going to take a look at Asana.

So if you're struggling with time to value or onboarding drop offs, that's ultimately going to impact trial to pay conversions and then users are inevitably going to churn.

So my plan here is to go through Asana, I'm going to tear it down, give my thoughts on what's working, what's not working, what can be improved and then you can take these learnings and then just apply it to your product.

So I'm going to go through the sign up, the onboarding and then we're going to create a project and assign a task as well.

So for those of you who don't know, Asana has evolved quite a bit recently.

I think it's still a project management tool but they've got AI built in there of course and they do lots of reporting, goal setting and I'm sure there's bound to be other workflows and automations in here as well.

Anyway, I'm just going to go through and review the user experience design.

So let's get started by clicking this one here.

So really like this signup page, we got the headline here one click away from less busy work.

So far from generic to a specific pain point and kind of just puts me at ease straight away.

Of course we're going to be trying this for free and then we don't need to worry about credit card details because they aren't required.

Looks like we've got two options.

One, to sign up with Google and then another to sign up with your work email with an option to go back to login, which is handy if we need to.

and then below that we've got some social proof in the form of logos as well.

So fairly straightforward.

okay, so let's continue with our Google account here.

Okay, so whatever reason, that took a little bit longer than expected and the last thing I think you want to be doing right now is frustrating users before they've even gotten into the product.

So they're preempting things here with a welcome message.

it looks like we're going to set the account up now which only takes A couple of minutes.

I think this is fine.

They seem to be setting expectations early here.

Obviously not a lot to see here, really.

not quite sure what the illustration is about, if I'm honest.

Let's hit get started then.

Okay.

So, welcome to Asana, you're signing up as.

And then it's given the email address here, which is useful, so I know if I've made a mistake, I can always go back.

So I like the fact I can see the email address here.

It's pulled through my full name, presumably from the Gmail account.

So that saves me some time from filling that in.

And then by default we've got get feature updates and tips via email I think it's a bit presumptuous to have that one checked by default.

So I'm going to uncheck that one over here on the right and we have some illustrations which I think are, on brand with what we saw on the website.

But they don't do a lot for me.

They don't seem to serve a purpose.

they don't animate, they don't move, they don't really do anything.

So for me, I would have loved to see some product screenshots in there.

so they get a sense of what they're going to see when they get into the product.

And then it looks like at this point, they're just clarifying the plan.

Right.

So I'm going to start on a 14 day advanced trial and then once that ends, we can continue with a free Asana personal plan.

So you're telling me what the plan is?

I'm going to be on the advanced plan, but I have no idea what that means.

Maybe when we get in there we'll be exposed to some of those features, but right now, I just don't know.

And then the last option here is to upload a profile picture.

I'm not going to do that here.

just so we can get into the product a bit quicker anyway.

So I'm going to click continue.

All right, so the illustration on the right has changed.

We've got this kind of work file over here.

And now they're asking about what we do for work, and they say this is to tailor the experience.

so hopefully that is the case.

So we've got three fairly simple questions here.

Then.

what is your role?

let's go with Freelancer.

What function best describes your work?

okay, it's quite a few here.

It'll be nice if we had a search.

Let's go with design.

And then what do we want to use Asana for?

Let's go with Design Sprints.

All right, I think we're done.

Not much else to it.

So let's click continue.

Okay, so what tools do you use?

Asana connects to your tools that your team's using every single day.

So again, they talk a lot about, like, personalizing the experience here.

and then when we get into the product, it'll become clearer about how they have personalized the experience.

Otherwise, when you go through a flow like this, quickly starts to feel laborious, monotonous, and just like hard work before we even get in there.

On the flip side to that, I understand that they're trying to maybe expose what tools you can connect to Asana, but I think at this point we just want to get into the product, experience some value, and then worry about connecting everything else.

So I'm not going to click anything.

I'm just going to click continue.

All right, so last step, maybe.

I don't know, because, it doesn't really tell us how many steps there are to this process.

So I'm never a huge fan, of asking people, to invite others as part of the onboarding.

I guess it makes a lot more sense when you're signing up for a product like this.

You're not going to be able to manage projects yourself.

So I understand why they've added this step in here.

but for me, again, I'm going to get into the product, I'm going to get some value before we worry about inviting anybody, because I suspect if I'm trying this out for the first time, I'm going to get in there, have a play around, figure out whether this is right for me, and then if that is the case, I'm then going to invite, my colleagues to the projects.

So still feels a little bit premature for me.

Anyway, let's click Continue to Sauna.

Okay, so it took a little bit of time to load there.

Even with the skeleton design, it felt like it probably took longer than it should do.

Anyway, we're in now.

and we haven't been taken straight to the home screen or a dashboard, but rather it looks like it's created a new project for me.

which I like because I think I can immediately get an understanding of, of projects.

I don't have to go hunting for them.

So it's taken me straight to a project.

It's added three tasks in there by default.

And then at the bottom here, it talks about the fact that this is the Asana project and we've got multiple views that we can access if we need to.

So presumably clicking on Board and Calendar changes the view for the project, which is really straightforward.

Now, oddly enough, the same thing happens up here when you click Board, Timeline, Calendar.

I think it's interesting that they've obviously pulled that out, highlighted that as a feature as soon as we've gotten into the project here.

I would guess that, they get a lot of users asking them immediately, okay, so how do we change the view for a specific project?

And it's probably not clear, to users how to do that immediately.

So they've clearly pulled that feature out.

So let's go with List for now and then we'll click Continue and we'll see if it highlights any of the features here.

okay, so this is interesting.

So there's some project setup steps that now sit at the bottom of the project.

guiding users.

So I think this is, a nice way of guiding users through that first experience.

I obviously have the option to explore the project in detail myself.

But what it's suggesting is at this point we kind of go through this sequence in order to understand some of the additional functionality.

So I'm going to start by adding a task.

Let's do that then.

Okay, so it looks like tasks are in line with the list view here.

Kind of half expected them to pop out over there on the right.

And then we've got a little tool tip here, which just gives me a bit guidance.

So we're adding a task.

these capture everything we need to get done.

We create our first one to start organizing the work.

So let's click.

Got it.

So we understand that.

And then as we, and then as we've done that, we can see on our project setup down here that's now moved to something that's complete.

Now we've added a task, but what we haven't done is given it a name.

okay, so let's do that.

Let's click in here.

Design task.

Okay, so that's simple enough.

So next up we are, going to assign it to a teammate.

that's what it's suggesting we do.

So we'll click on this one down here so we can assign the task to somebody to take responsibility for it.

His tooltips are very prominent.

All right, I get it.

Let's do that.

Okay, so we're not really completing these tasks and it's marking them as complete.

we're just clicking into them and then it's showing me where to go and what to do.

So.

So I do want to see if we can add somebody to that specific task, understand what that process looks like.

Alright, so I'm going to go back and assign, that task to a Teammate.

Then let's go through that process.

So you can see as we're hovering over some of these items in the to do list we have contextual hover states, which is nice.

So let's assign this task then.

Now you can see, I'm the only one in here right now.

So let's invite our teammate.

I like the fact that this isn't a modal.

That just obscures everything we're doing.

We're inviting somebody within context of this window.

So I like the fact they haven't used a big modal window here so often.

They're just completely unnecessary.

We've got a small contextual menu here where we can type in an email address and we can assign the task.

So it's really nice that they're signposting the fact that this email is outside of the workspace before we invite them.

And then by default we have this option here which states that we're also inviting this person to the project, not just the task.

And interestingly enough, that's checked by default.

So presumably if we invite this email address, then they'll be able to see all of the other tasks in the project, but they'll only be assigned task three.

So I think users just need to be careful about what they're doing here.

If there's anything sensitive that they shouldn't see, then you probably need to uncheck that one.

So let's click send.

Alright, and then we've got some confirmation, bottom left here.

Assigning task to this email address.

All right guys, I think I'm going to leave it there and feels maybe a little bit hit and miss this one.

signup was pretty straightforward.

Onboarding started to feel quite laborious as we went through it.

I think this project setup down here, is an interesting concept, albeit maybe it could have been executed a little bit better.

But generally speaking I, think they do a pretty good job, the UX here.

Anyway, let me know what you guys think.

Cheers.

Bye.