Asana ♥: share gratitude and enthusiasm with your team

At Asana, we spend a lot of time trying to build towards the future on top of robust technology. But helping you do great things is about more than the software we build; it’s also about the humans who use the software. When Asana does its job, you just feel like a team. You’re excited about the work that you’re doing, and you’re inspired to work together. These ingredients are essential in accomplishing your ambitious goals.

During a recent hackathon, a few collaborators and I set out to promote more energy and team connection through a familiar tool: the “like” button. Building the functionality was the easy part, but we spent extra effort to make sure we were adding warmth to Asana without sacrificing productivity. We think we’ve risen to the challenge.

Over the last few months we’ve found Asana a more gratifying place to work. Now, we’re excited to share that experience with you.

Introducing Asana Hearts

Today, we’re launching Hearts in Asana, a great way to express enthusiasm, offer agreement and share gratitude with your teammates. Here are a few ways to ♥ tasks, comments and attachments effectively with your team:

Share Gratitude

One of the great advantages of productivity technology is that it enables people to work without having to meet in person. However, eliminating these face-to-face interactions can dampen your team’s ability to appreciate each others’ work. People can start to treat each other like robots rather than humans.

With Hearts, it couldn’t be easier to connect as a team. When someone completes a task, just click ♥. The person who completed the task will receive an Inbox message letting him or her know how much you appreciate the hard work.

Move Forward Effortlessly

While participating in an important decision, it can be tempting to create a nuanced, multi-paragraph response when all you really need to say is “Yes!”. Streamlining communication is essential to driving towards consensus and action.

♥ someone’s comment to express whatever positive sentiment you need. Whether it’s “I think this is a good idea” or “Yes to your question” or “Wow, I’m impressed”, you can let your heart speak for you.

Find Your Team’s Passion

We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure you’re successful at breaking down your projects into concrete steps, scoping and prioritizing those steps, and ultimately achieving your goals. That’s just part of being successful. It’s just as important to determine what you should be working on. What excites your team is an important component of answering that question, but information about people’s excitement levels can be hard to collect and synthesize, and so it can go underused.

Now, hearts can surface your team’s excitement in an easily scannable way. Simply create a project and suggest that your team members submit ideas and ♥ the tasks they think contain the best ones. Once everyone has expressed their sentiment, click “Heart” in the “Sort By” menu to bubble up the top-ranked options. If people follow the project, they can continue to express their enthusiasm over time as new ideas get added.

Hearts at Work

At Asana, we believe that people can accomplish greater things by working together than they can by going it alone. Asana is designed to make working together effortless and rewarding, both individually and collectively. Fostering connections within a team is central to that goal. Asana is software that recognizes we are all people, even at work. Too often, business software is not humane. We hope to change that, building software from our hearts. We hope you ♥ our work.

(Fun side note: Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein led the “Like” project at Facebook.)