Discussion that lives where the work lives
GanttPRO is a project management tool built around Gantt charts. Teams plan timelines, assign tasks, and track progress — but until this project, they had no way to discuss those tasks inside the product. Questions, status updates, and blockers were happening in Slack or email, disconnected from the tasks they referred to.
The brief: design a Communication Hub that lets team members add comments, ask questions, and share updates directly within a task — keeping discussion contextual and searchable.
Context-switching was eating productivity
Stakeholder interviews and session recordings revealed a consistent pattern: a project manager sees a task is behind schedule, opens Slack to ask the assignee, receives a reply an hour later, and loses the thread when they return to GanttPRO. The decision — and the reasoning behind it — never makes it back to the task.
- Task updates were fragmented across tools (Slack, email, in-app notifications)
- There was no record of why a task changed status — only that it did
- New team members joining a project had no way to understand the history of decisions
Research, lo-fi concepts, user validation
Worked with the product manager and two developers to define scope: what belongs in a task communication thread versus a project-level activity feed? Established clear boundaries to avoid feature creep.
Analyzed task communication in Linear, Notion, Asana, Jira, and Basecamp. Key insight: the most effective implementations kept comments close to task metadata (assignee, status, due date) rather than in a separate panel.
Explored sidebar panel, inline expansion, and split-pane layouts. The sidebar direction won: it kept the Gantt chart fully visible while making comments accessible without a full-page transition.
Tested the Figma prototype with 5 GanttPRO users. Key findings: users wanted @mention support, the ability to attach files to comments, and a clear visual distinction between comments and system activity entries.
Delivered component specs, interaction states, and an annotated prototype. Collaborated daily during the 3-week implementation sprint to handle edge cases (empty states, notification badges, mention autocomplete).
A conversation thread that never loses the task
The Communication Hub is a persistent sidebar panel that opens alongside any task in GanttPRO. It contains:
- Threaded comments — with @mention support, emoji reactions, and file attachment
- Activity log — automatic entries for status changes, assignee updates, and due date shifts, visually distinct from human comments
- Notification control — per-task follow toggle; followers get in-app and email notifications for new comments on that task
The panel persists its scroll position per task and remembers unread state. Opening a task from a notification takes you directly to the relevant comment.
Discussion back where it belongs
Post-launch feedback from power users was consistently positive — particularly the combination of human comments and automatic activity log in a single thread. Teams reported using Slack significantly less for task-specific discussion after the feature shipped.
The Communication Hub became one of the most-requested-then-released features in GanttPRO's public roadmap — and later served as the foundation for the real-time notification system built in 2023.
