Google Drive
Integration

Problem

Individual contributers were creating work in Google Docs but managing the status of it in Asana, making it difficult to keep track of conversations. This led to constant tool-switching, fragmented feedback, and no single source of truth.

Internally, we could see that the majority of links pasted in Asana come from Google Drive. It was also #3 on our Voice of the Customer ranking, with customers requesting "2 way comment sync". Instead of assuming this was the feature we'd build, we went into the problem definition phase with questions to ask customers.

My approach

• 01 I ran 10 user interviews. I designed the study, refined with PM and UXR, built prototypes to test.

  What Resonated

  • Awareness of activities: users valued having a tool that surfaces writing activity and feedback in one place, removing the need to jump between platforms.
  • Creating a record of work: users appreciated Asana as a central communication hub, especially the ability to sync Google Docs activity so all communication is tracked in one place.

  What Didn't

  • Full comment sync was overwhelming: users felt it produced too many updates and notifications.
  • Loss of context: when only a word or short phrase is highlighted in a comment, users still needed to go back to the doc to understand the larger context.
• 02 Mapped the full document lifecycle from creation through review and resolution to find where the seams were most painful.
• 03 Evaluated two strategic directions and advocated for comment sync as the higher-confidence path: more useful day-to-day, lower risk than deeper integrations.
• 04 Made nuanced calls on notification logic, batching behavior, settings tradeoffs, and installation flow. These were the details that make an integration feel native vs. bolted on.

Designs

I iterated across widget and notification designs, pressure-testing edge cases throughout. The integration centered on comment sync, surfacing Google Docs comments as Asana tasks without requiring users to context-switch to resolve them.

Key design decisions included how to handle notification batching so users weren't overwhelmed, what installation felt like for someone unfamiliar with OAuth flows, and how settings should be scoped at the project vs. task level. Below are designs of the core surfaces.