Asana
Text Widgets
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
PM, EM, TL, 2 Engineers
TIMELINE
May 2024
Pain point
Customers have highlighted a key gap in Asana reporting: the inability to add context and narrative. As a result, teams rely on external tools such as Google Sheets and PowerBI to supplement dashboards with commentary for leadership, creating manual and inefficient workflows.
VoCs
“Ability to provide more context and a narrative of the reporting will make it easier to share reporting with senior leadership and help improve the adoption of Asana reporting - and reduce LSEG's reliance on PowerBi.”
“We want to add context/words and tell folks what is going on with the report. Right now, we are doing this in Google Sheets because there's more flexibility with the cells. If we could add words to a report, that would keep more things in Asana.”
“Currently, there is not place to leave notes in the dashboard for folks who are reviewing it. Databricks would like a place to have free-form notes that users can edit and leave for visitors who come to the dashboards/reports.”
Key design decisions
Text widget metadata
Unlike dynamic charts, text widgets don't update live on dashboards, which could lead to outdated information. To address this, we added timestamps and the editor's name directly into text widgets. Now, users can easily see when the widget was last updated and who made changes in project, portfolio, and universal dashboards.
Header size
Executive summaries often have titles for each text section. Similarly, we will prompt users to create a heading when they first add a text widget. We've adjusted the existing chart widget header style from H6 to H5 to match the header size of the text editor component's default text. This ensures a cohesive look across all widgets on the dashboard.
Toolbar item reordering
The current text editor toolbar includes items that don’t necessarily make sense on dashboard text widgets, such as code, code blocks, and text blocks. For real-estate purposes, we decided to hide these in the + button and instead add image and table settings in the toolbar. This exposure would nudge users to add images and tables to text widgets– a short-term solution until we build dedicated widgets for them.
Text widget states
Final design
Impact
As of February 25, 2025:
~2600 non-empty text widgets have been created
22% of domains that have access to Dashboards have added at least one non-empty Text Widget (this jumps to 98.5% if we include empty and non-empty text widgets)
Our largest customer, Amazon, has created over 600 text widgets
This feature was a huge unlock for native reporting users, enabling them to derive even more value from dashboards through text summaries. It also provided a workaround for adding images, tables, Asana links, and other URLs that come with text editor capabilities. By incorporating these essential features into reporting, we improved the experience for PMOs and executive leaders who rely on recurring executive summaries of work and strategy data.
From Bastien Siebman, Asana Solutions Partner:
“What seemed like a "good but minor update" to the Asana dashboards is actually way more powerful than anticipated. Arthur BÉGOU went a little deeper than most of us and realised that because this is a rich text widget, you can also embed videos, images, but also a full Looker Studio dashboard! So technically you can now have an Asana dashboard, and some charts can come from Looker Studio... 🤯 How cool is that?”
© 2026 Ji Yoon Ahn