Designing Asana integrations to streamline project management workflows


Reducing manual data entry for project managers by enabling Velt comments to be turned into Asana tasks.


The brief — the problem, goals, & impact


Problem

Manual copying and pasting comments to tasks to project management platforms burdens project managers. Project managers typically spend an average of 10 hours a week manually creating tasks.

Goal

Our goal was to help decrease time spent on manual tasking by 50%.

Impact

—Decreased time spent on manual data entry by 70%

Understanding the current workflows of project managers


Quantitative data

Initially, we created surveys to explore what project management tools were currently being used by our customers. 70% of customers were on Asana, 25% were on ClickUp, and 5% were using Trello.


Qualitative data

After gathering survey data, we decided to narrow in our focus on Asana project managers. Our goals were to understand the workflow of converting a comment to a task, and dive deeper into some of their pain points through interviews. I used affinity mapping to piece together common themes.

Synthesized insights

—Manually converting comments into tasks is time consuming (typically they'll hand comb through each comment).
—Project managers place comments in different levels, like projects, and tasks.
—Project managers aren't sure which comments should be turned into tasks.

How might we help project managers efficiently turn comments into tasks?


As a team, many exciting directions were explored including Asana integrations , building our own project management tool, converting comments into excel data. Through team consesus we honed in on Asana integrations.

Early usability testing


Once we fleshed out enough content to turn wireframes into higher fidelity prototypes, we were ready to validate them with project managers. One of our goals for usability testing were task completion. We found that half, the users were able to get through the flow. However, we learned that some project managers wanted to connect down to a task which was a sub-level below the project. We ended up iterating to enable this.

Prototyping


Integrations workflow lives inside the dashboard

To enable Asana integrations, a user would click on the left side nav bar. They would need to connect to a project, which would send them to an auth screen.



Selecting a workspace, connecting a SuperFlow project to an Asana project

Project managers can either connect down to the project or task level, depending on preference.



Ability to edit and delete integrated projects

After connecting a SuperFlow project to an Asana project or task, project managers have the ability to edit and remove through the more menu.

The results — user and business impact


Through an iterative design approach, we were able to help project managers cut down manual data entry by 70%.