How Asana used Prolific to research the future of work
Asana, an AI work management platform, has been on a mission to help teams work together effortlessly since its launch in 2012.
To stay ahead of the curve, Asana has an in-house think tank called the Work Innovation Lab. This lab conducts cutting-edge research into the future of work to help businesses innovate and thrive.
When Asana wanted to dig deeper into how people collaborate at work, they turned to Prolific to accelerate their research.
The goal
Anna James,the Work Innovation Analytics Lead at Asana, was looking to run a study on how workers use digital collaboration tools.
Knowledge workers today juggle many tools, including video conferencing platforms, project management software, instant messaging apps, and more. This "tech stack" can become overwhelming, hindering productivity and causing frustration. Asana's research aimed to understand the impact of this phenomenon on workers, build on this, and explore ways to optimize collaboration.
They wanted to dig deeper and understand what makes up people's tech stacks today and how they can be optimized to alleviate digital exhaustion.
The challenges
Anna wanted to find a way to get fast, high-quality, and affordable results. “[The] trade-off is really, really tricky,” she explained. “When you add kind of internal client-side contracting and the legal approvals and all of the stuff that has to go through... Those timelines can get really extended”.
Add to this the need to compare insights across different studies, and you can see how traditional research methods might struggle to deliver. The level of pace, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness Asana was looking to drive was beyond most other methods.
The solution Prolific provided
This is where Prolific came in. The platform offered faster recruitment through pre-vetted participant pools, cost-efficiency with over 200,000 verified and globally distributed participants, and enhanced data quality using advanced screening tools.
The key benefits of working with Prolific
Faster recruitment
Prolific's pre-vetted participant pool allowed for quick and simple recruitment of respondents from the demographics Anna wanted to target.
Cost-efficiency
Prolific has a pool of more than 200,000 vetted and verified participants. This means setting up and running the study was much quicker and more cost-effective than other methods.
Enhanced data quality
Prolific's advanced screening tools ensured data collection from the desired demographics. They also ensured that respondents were real, unique, and AI-free while minimizing bias.
“I've played around with a lot of market research tools specifically. Prolific has elevated my experience. It elevated the quality of the research that we can conduct in a shorter amount of time.”
- Anna James, Work Innovation Analytics Lead, Asana
Why Asana chose Prolific
Prolific's role in this research is crucial. By offering a user-friendly platform, pre-vetted participants, and advanced screening options, Prolific enabled Asana to immediately customize their target audience with extreme precision.
Sign up to watch the full video case study
Initially working with Prolific’s 300+ free audience filters, Anna wanted to see what more could be done. Prolific immediately got to work.
“The pre-screeners are definitely the most helpful element. We worked with the Prolific team to have our own standard pre-screener questions on the platform itself. That allows us to maintain that consistency across all our studies.”
- Anna James, Work Innovation Analytics Lead, Asana
Results and key findings
The research revealed a clear negative impact of excessive collaboration tools. A surprising finding was that participants reported spending a staggering 84 minutes daily switching between tools. Moreover, almost three-quarters of respondents would prefer that their collaboration were standardized across the company.
“Continually switching between tools or not knowing which tool to use with which team—all of that back-and-forth just wastes people's time. That was definitely an interesting insight.”
- Anna James, Work Innovation Analytics Lead, Asana
This inefficiency and wasted time associated with tech stack overload was a key finding. Imagine the cumulative impact of this wasted time on individuals. Then, expand that out to workflow disruption across a large organization—and the impact optimizing the tech stack could have.
Another member of the Asana team, Mark Hoffman, took things further. His research on the optimal number of tools per category adds another layer of insight, suggesting limiting communication tools to two in addition to email.
This provides a practical starting point for organizations looking to streamline their tech stack and improve productivity. This finding really drives home the importance of focusing on core functionality and avoiding the lure of adopting more and more tools.
As Anna says, “I think for leaders more broadly, there's definitely the consideration of how I can streamline the organization's tech stack as a whole to make sure that we are removing that friction.”
Prolific’s flexible platform and advanced screeners enabled Asana to unlock critical insights into collaboration tools. If you need fast, easy access to vetted participants at scale, get started with Prolific in just 15 minutes.
