Adam Butler

Adam Butler

Product Design Lead @ Asana in San Francisco, He/him/his

About

Product design @ Asana. I also take photos and play music sometimes.

Work Experience

2016 — Now
San Francisco

Designed many 0 → 1 features and experiences for the core product and developer platform, including:

  • Custom fields
  • Portfolios
  • Developer experience (incl. developer console, app publishing and distribution experiences, app authorization, enterprise app management, and more)
  • App components system
  • Integrations (incl. Jira Cloud, Salesforce, MS Teams, and more)
  • Enterprise admin console
  • Project templates
  • Comment-only permissions on projects
  • Milestones
  • CSV → Asana project importer tool
2011 — 2015
Scottsdale, AZ

UI/UX, front-end web development, design strategy, art direction, email marketing, photography, video production, project management, and client relations.

2011 — 2011
Designer at Park&Co
Phoenix, AZ

Web, print, and production design.

2009 — 2011
Senior Designer at Omedix
Scottsdale, AZ

Designed websites for medical practices nationwide. Worked on the Omedix Patient Portal UI/UX.

Projects

2022

Designed a product system and API for developers to build custom apps inside Asana's UI. There are 4 main components developers can customize for their own use cases:

  • Widget: Show dynamic data in a card inside Asana tasks
  • Modal Form: Build a custom form to collect info from Asana users
  • Rule Actions: Create a custom action for Asana's automation engine (Rules)
  • Lookup: Allow users to search for external resources from within Asana

The system is designed to leverage Asana's core design system components so that any developer can create an app that feels native to Asana.

Companies like Clockwise, Miro, Jotform, Reclaim.ai, Flowsana, and others have built and published apps using app components. App components is used in over 30 published apps in Asana's app ecosystem.

2022

Developers can create apps that use our API and/or app components to deliver new experiences for Asana's customers. The developer console serves as the place to do high-level configuration of an app throughout the developer journey.

2020

Communication tools like Teams are widely used at Asana's customers' companies. To avoid switching back and forth between Teams and Asana so often, we decided to deeply integrate with the Teams platform.

Users can create tasks from Teams, unfurl tasks & projects in Teams conversations, get notified in Teams about activity happening in Asana, create automations to send Teams messages when things happen in Asana, and more.

Designed with Microsoft Fluent UI

2019

Many Asana users work with engineering teams who track their work in Jira. At the end of the day, these teams still need to work together. The Jira Cloud integration for Asana allows business teams to see the status of associated work happening in Jira and create new Jira issues without leaving Asana.

The Jira Cloud integration served as the prototype for what would later become App Components—a development framework that allows developers to build apps right into Asana's core UI surfaces.

2019

Sales teams often collaborate with other teams in business or marketing orgs on various things throughout the sales cycle. In the pre-sales flow, sales reps might reach out to Marketing for collateral to help them pitch an account. After a deal is closed, a Sales team might need to hand off an account to an implementation-focused team like Customer Success. These kinds of workflows formed the basis for the Asana for Salesforce integration.

Sales teams can add an Asana widget to objects like Opportunities to create and track status of tasks with their partner teams. They can also set up a custom automation from Salesforce to kick off new projects in Asana when certain deal stages are reached. This helps collaboration between these teams feel more seamless, efficient, and clear.

Designed with Salesforce Lightning Design System

2018

Portfolios is a flexible project health tracking dashboard targeted at managers who oversee and report across many projects, teams, or initiatives. This tool serves as one of the core building blocks to the work graph and the Asana product. Portfolios formed the basis of Asana's Business pricing tier in 2018.

2017

This was the first instance of user permissions in Asana. Comment-only projects allowed users to control who can edit projects, and who can just comment on tasks in the project.

Creating the design for this required a deep understanding of the entire system and data model of Asana. It was necessary to understand all possible relationships and interactions between tasks and projects in Asana, as well as how other features like search and My Tasks were affected by varying permission levels. The final UX needed to make it simple to set permission and intuitive to understand the effects of permissions across the system.

2016

Tasks in Asana started out with basic fields like Assignee, Due Date, Description, and Tags. This was great, but too limiting. Now tablestakes in collaboration software, custom fields allowed users to define their own fields and track their work in ways that were specific to their own workflows. The introduction of custom fields was crucial for Asana becoming flexible enough to become a best-in-class work tracking tool.

Side Projects

Ongoing

Although I don't play as much anymore, music has always been a big part of my life. I've been writing music since college and released a number of instrumental songs over the years.

Relevant genres:
Post-rock, ambient, neoclassical

Musical influences:
Hammock, This Will Destroy You, Sigur Ros, Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm, Caspian, Tycho, Explosions in the Sky, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, The Album Leaf

Education

2005 — 2009
Denver, CO

Double-major: Digital Media Studies, Electronic Media Arts & Design

Contact

LinkedIn
Instagram
Twitter
Soundcloud