Mobile: Strategy and Home
Background
In 2023 Asana invested in strengthening our mobile teams due to slow growth trends.
Through research, we found that combo-users (users that use both mobile AND web) were more engaged than web only users.
Combined with the fact that up until then, mobiles main operating modal had been to design for parity with web and not much else leadership decided to invest in mobile to encourage growth.
Pains
With UXR we did a deep dive into the pains that existed among mobile users to help set a baseline for the work that we would take on in the coming months and years. In a nutshell, doing work on a phone is difficult and up until that point, we didnt make it easy for our users partially due to our commitment to mobile <> web parity.
Strategic principles
With a good understanding of the pain our users were encountering, product, design and UXR collaborated on coming up with principles and scenarios that could help drive the work forward. Generally speaking, we wanted to drastically reduce the effort needed for users to find and do their work - even it meant the mobile app tee's things up for web usage later.
Home: An oppertunity space
While the goal was always to improve the entire app, we started with the Home screen. It presented a clear opportunity to tackle broader issues with the mobile experience. Since it was less used at the time compared to Task Details and Inbox, we saw it as a space where we could move faster and take bolder risks.
Mapping our principles to visuals
Working with UXR, we defined key jobs-to-be-done from the user’s perspective, which helped guide our early whiteboarding and ideation.
We thought a lot about users who were on the go. The people who were commuting to work or between meetings. How might they see their work in a way that felt digestible.
As the concepts took shape, we sketched out a rough information architecture and visual direction that led to a widget-style interface. This approach felt promising—it allowed important or overlooked work to surface in a clear, accessible way.
Our mobile vision. Dialed in
Early in the process, we defined a few design principles to guide consistent decision-making: “Actionable in 5 minutes,” “Big, beautiful UI,” and “Protect flow.” You can see examples of each below.
During this conceptual phase, we explored what Home could look like for different user states—new users, healthy users, and those leveraging mobile-specific strengths like quick capture via camera, voice, and integrations.
Focus concept: Capture
Our intent for Capture was to showcase mobile’s unique strengths within the Asana ecosystem, guided by the principle: “Introduce the value of mobile.” Mobile devices are uniquely suited for turning real-world moments into quick, lightweight entries, something the web can’t do as intuitively.
On the left, I explored how users might swipe from the Home screen to quickly capture a whiteboard with their camera and turn it into a task.
On the right, we imagined a voice note–taking flow to help users log thoughts on the go.
Focus concept: Learning on Home
I was curious about how we could better guide users through new experiences. Inspired by short-form video tutorials on YouTube and TikTok, I explored an inline video concept that shifted focus around the screen as the tutorial progressed, making learning feel more interactive and intuitive.
With the vision in place and alignment from leadership, we shifted focus to staffing the Home initiative. Up to that point, I had been working closely with team leads to shape the strategy and direction.
Asana’s mobile teams are small, so we assembled a lightweight group: three engineers, one PM, and myself. Given the team size and leadership’s caution around a bigger first swing, we focused on a safer initial release, with the intent to quickly iterate toward bolder ideas if the launch went well.
Results
Although the initial release was a simplified version of our original vision, the results were strong. We saw improvements across nearly every key metric we targeted. While we knew there was still room to bring more of the vision to life, our focus shifted to building momentum for the next release.
1-2%
Mobile visited 2d7, 2d28, 3d7, 3d28, 4d28, 5d28
Strategic metric
3.3%
Increase in mobile sessions
Target metric
1.36%
Increase in Asana sessions
Target metric
Increased % of users loading the Home page (2d) by 1.5%
Learning metric
Takeaway
Leveraging Home to "drive users to their work" and "boost signal-to-noise" proved to be an impactful strategy.
Next steps
We chose to double down on team leads and individual contributors as a core audience to help focus and guide Home’s direction.
Around the same time, the broader mobile team began running regular design sprints, using our work as a reference point as they refreshed other parts of the app to align with this new direction.
Below are some examples of the widgets we shipped in the following halves, which were informed by our learnings from V1 and ambitions from the original vision work.
Conclusion
This was one of my favorite projects. I had the opportunity to think big, shape strategy, and bring ideas to life with a great team, all while tackling some of our users’ biggest pain points. I also learned that dreaming big often means starting small. It can be tough to scale back an ambitious vision, but this work reminded me that meaningful change is a marathon, not a sprint.
