Meet the new Asana | Hacker News Reader

Meet the new Asana

blog.asana.com

122 pointsrayshan72 comments

I have used Asana for years always wanting to like it. It's almost what I want and it's nearly done right.

I think this is it for me though. Don't think I can look at those serifs for very long. Overall the design just feels way overwrought and without any clear organizing idea. The margins are all over the place, there are lots of controls that are way too small. The page looks messy and difficult to focus on. To what end?

For me getting things done is closely linked with focus. Shouldn't the design thinking of a company that helps people get things done reflect that? Spare me the gradients I have shit to do.

Why is the top post on every single HN story negative?

We have to stop chugging the haterade.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation w/ Asana & have no strong opinions about the redesign

Yeah, I have some design issues with the fonts.

Typographically speaking, Amasis (the serif type now being used for headlines) is an odd choice for a pairing with Proxima Nova (what they are continuing to use for everything else). It looks a bit awkward at the size and weight they have it because it's actually a slab serif (check out https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/amasis/) and the slabs turn into slightly chunky serifs on standard-DPI screens (though it does look a bit better on Retina). This, combined with a similar visual weight to the other text, contributes to the lack of contrast you describe.

What I'd advise is either bumping up the weight on Amasis to increase the contrast and disambiguate the slab serifs, or better yet, switching to a nicer overall serif type such as Hoefler & Co's Mercury Display (http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-display/overview/).

Funny how totally different people are:

I can read comic sans, arial, times no problems. I don't care or even notice as long as my programming font lines up. Margins inconsistent by two pixels? No problem as long as the layout is overall consistent (logical hierarchies are somehow obvious.)

You sound like you work in UI/UX and I would wish people could care more about things that do matter to me, so here is a list of what I would like:

  * not everyone has been at all the meetings and know how 
  "obvious" everything is - make things discoverable
  * not everyone use the computer the same way - by all 
  means make it easy to click and I don't expect vim or 
  emacs keybindings in web apps but don't forget tabbing 
  order.
  * not everyone can see all colors - I also like nice 
  colors but I don't want to miss out because I cannot 
  see all shades of green

I opened this page just to write exactly the same words ... "I want to like it ...".

I've tried it at least five times, and every time I end up stopping. What's missing (IMHO) is a sense of hierarchy. Everything is the same size and common actions aren't much easier than uncommon ones, which I think leads to "page looks messy and difficult to focus on", and I agree "controls ... are way too small".

I feel there are too many controls without a sense of hierarchy. I get lost knowing which sub list of which task under which project I'm looking at. Plus with the amount of controls there are I'd expect it to be more powerful.

Likewise - I really want to like it.

If that is your only issue could you not add your own custom css on top of it?

I'm interested to see that people refer to Asana as "project management" software when it's really a glorified todo list. How does it significantly differ from the other todo list products in the space (e.g. donedone, todoist)? Are people using it to work with external clients or in place of a bug tracker?

It's both a glorified todo list and bona fide project management software. For examples, it handles in-app notifications around the task lifecycle, task hierarchies, a calendar, a "team" abstraction, and an abstraction it calls "projects" which I believe can be configured to a custom business workflow. In our 6 person org, it has indeed replaced email (we have Slack of course, too).

The announcement is very enterprisey -- long, boring, not getting to the meat of the news. I couldn't get through it.

I hope this isn't a sign of where the Asana product and culture are headed.

no amount of rose colors can change the fact that it is an enterprise product, a delight of middle managers who measure progress by the total percentage of hours logged so far on all the SCRUM tasks across the department.

If I was very very rich and I really hated other people, I'd start a company making miserably slow, unintuitive project management software. Say what you will about the Aussies, their software is slightly less awful.

> The new Asana is designed to give you a feeling of calm and focus (ahhh…). When you first start a project, it looks like a simple sheet of crisp, white paper. But as you work, elements animate and light up in delightful ways (oooh…). When you complete tasks and get results with your team, Asana celebrates with you—and sometimes a flying unicorn does too.

Does anyone else find this tone off-putting? I think it's the telling me (or insinuating) how I will feel part that bugs me. Like if I went into a store to buy a bottle of water and they insisted on telling me how refreshed I will feel after I drink it. It's over the top.

If you don't like that tone, definitely don't watch the video as it has zero details and is all jargon about "teams working smarter" without so much as a screenshot or product details.

I can see how the whimsical tone might not be for everybody but personally I don't mind the tone so much. I read it more as them conveying what they were trying to accomplish with their design choices.

Yeah man! I'm repulsed by all software that tries to have an attitude.

People with attitudes are cool when they keep themselves fresh and upredictable, and adapt to the feedback they get. When 'attitude' is repetitive or predictable, or doesn't heed it's feedback, it becomes a horribly grating gimic.

I want my computers to be computer-like. Predictable, flavorless tools that give feedback in terms of 'success' or 'error' only. I don't want a virual personal assistant that tries to cover its lack of functionality with 'personality'. I don't want my activity monitor to encourage me to reach 'goals' it set. I don't want my project management software to include rewards- how fucking patronizing is that? The reward is the project that I'm working on! Not a color splash or smiley face in the glorified checklist I'm using!

Let's transplant an Asimov robot's (lack of) personality into my phone and rm -r /Siri/

Yeah, this, and then the marketing video amps it up even further.
I'm probably jaded with having tried 100 project management tools in the last decade (including Asana), but it seems designed to appeal to the kind of clueless management that will dictate Asana to his subordinate teams while being too high up the chain to actually use it (classic Enterprise software problem I know). For those in the trenches, the aesthetics of a tool are all but irrelevant—once you start using the tool it's the functionality that matters and how it looks completely fades into the background.

I have used Asana in the past - I think their technology (Luna, or whatever it is now called) is impressive but every single client I have now days is using Slack and I was forced to convert over - I know it is a different product but it integrates with Github, CircleCi, etc. so you can basically accomplish the same thing through integration (at least it seems that way)

Slack and Asana are completely different, I'm not sure how you can say they accomplish the same thing. Slack is a group chat and Asana is for task management. My company actually uses both, and Asana is integrated with Slack. We can create Asana tasks directly from a Slack conversation and assign them to someone. As a software developer, ideally I want to be using Jira. We're a small company of 8 and decided we needed something for everyone, not just developers, and right now we've settled on Asana and I love it. Our business and marketing projects are organized very differently than our development projects, and that's great.

I'm in the same boat as the parent: ALL my clients use Slack, and none of them wanted to use Asana, so I gave up.
Sure, Asana does task management... but that's about all it does. Slack is a lot more casual, and you can create channels for each project and have conversations there about who will be doing which task.
Internally, we actually use Trello for task management. Honestly, it's far superior to Asana in terms of ease of use and flexibility. It has less features, but that just encourages keeping things organized in simple ways, which is great.

Well, yeah, you have to use the right tool for the job. You don't use a task management tool to chat with clients.
You find Trello easier to use and more flexible than Asana? I actually find the exact opposite. You do task management for your entire company with Trello?

We have a team of about 10 people. Yeah, we use Trello for the whole team.

I, also, use Trello over Asana on most projects

Agreed - I about the ease of use - example:
Yesterday, I logged back into to look at their new UI (which is very pretty) and it took me 5 minutes to figure out how to remove someone from the workspace
Trello doesn't have the design that Asana has, but it gets the done. You can also add task lists using markdown in Github issues, which is my personal favorite.

I've gotten a lot of use and a lot of value out of Asana and much appreciate all the great work they have put into the product. I'm liking the new UI and love that they kept the celebration unicorn in the updated version (under myprofile settings->HACKS). For me Asana does a great job of making it easy to organize things, which I find possible but more hassle on other systems. The UI is quite nice for web based and it is easy to create, track and search for tasks. It is one of those tools that is reaching a complexity point that I'd like some additional demos on how people get the most use out of it.
I also appreciate that they have an iphone app as I can add things on the go or in meetings which is really important to avoid dropping tasks for me. My main wish is that they made it easier to create tasks in the iphone version as currently there is a lot of separate (mostly empty) screens to create, assign, and add a date for a single new task on the iphone version.

Despite how crowded this category is, the options still all seem to be pretty rough.
Does anyone really like their project management software?

> Does anyone really like their project management software?
I've been a JIRA user for 10 years+. Flirted with Redmine, Asana, Trello, Pivotal. Recently Atlassian pushed me over the edge, and I've started migrating my projects to YouTrack. Really impressed so far; been using it with one project for about 4 weeks. I haven't come across a "how do I..." yet that doesn't have an answer.

What was the problem you had with Atlassian, if you don't mind sharing?

They ditched the version summary report in version 7. That's really core to efficient navigation of sprints if not using Jira Agile. The product manager who I complained to clearly isn't thinking about the needs of non Jira Agile users.

Thanks!

After trying dozens of personal productivity tools for web/mobile/desktop (and writing my own Asana clone[1]), about 2 years ago I settled on Trello. I use it every single day, many times a day. I find it's the perfect balance of flexibility and simplicity for me. Plus it's free.
Having said that, when I've tried using Trello with teams, I tend not to like it nearly as much.
I think the Hard Problem with team productivity tools is optimizing for both individual organization and organizing individuals. I've never found a tool that's good enough at both for me to be fully satisfied.
[1] https://github.com/aroman/keeba http://keeba.jbha.org/about

Try out wiplo.com, I made it for this specific purpose (team + personal use)

Would be nice to put pricing information and explain what you get with a free account on the front page. I won't sign up without that info.

Very clean. This looks great. What are you plans with it?

I think the real problem is email. It's this antiquated technology that doesn't fit into the modern software as a service tools everyone uses to get things done. Email worked in the world of desktop apps but the snail mail paradigm email emulates is antithetical to the real-time fast paced team collaboration everyone is trying to achieve.
Yet nothing manages to replace email, we depend on email above all else and what happens is that important information about tasks leaks into email from project management software and there's no easy way for this kind of software to fold email into what they're trying to do. Email doesn't play nice with anyone, it doesn't even play nice with email servers and email clients. Yet we all use it. I doubt anything will replace email. 200 years from now space ships on their way to Vega will be sending IMAP mail messages to planet Earth.

This is exactly why I created Donald (http://getDonald.com). So many clients just default to email and don't use whatever project management system you ask them to. Sometimes even your own team defaults to email above all else.
I agree with you that email is a utility at this point that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I think it's a matter of successfully integrating and organizing email alongside other apps/systems, and I do think that's possible.

>Email worked in the world of desktop apps
actually it worked well before that.
> the real-time fast paced team collaboration everyone is trying to achieve.
Resist. Just say no. No pasaran.

Combination of;
JIRA for QA/Ticket management/Sprint planning Confluence for Wiki/documenting Slack for team comms Trello for higher level business planning (org, not projects)
Has worked very well over here (300+ sized business)

Check out hiTask, it has been around since 2007.

The video intro to the new interface is incredible, almost mesmerising. I really like the use of the circles from the new logo to symbolise key points and draw the eye to certain things.
Was this done in-house, or by a third party?

We're really excited about this launch, it's been months in the making.

I really like a lot of what you've done, though there's still some polish needed (I love that you do polish weeks). Asana has been fantastic to work with, and it really makes it possible to do my job. Thank you!
One thing I'm sorry to see continue to go unfixed is the inability to copy and paste text out of MS Word or Outlook into asana without losing formatting and having the spaces removed between words. I've spoken to support about it, but get a response of "just copy and paste it into textedit or notepad, then copy that into asana", which isn't really a solution.
We use asana for graphic design projects (among many other things) where text formatting is important. Bits and pieces often come out of emails, and it would be a huge productivity boost to be able to work directly in comments and task descriptions instead of attachments (or having to paste, fix, and reformat each comment).
Seems like it would be an important feature, it's a problem I work around daily.

When was the last time you've tried? We support some amount of formatting https://blog.asana.com/2014/06/rich-text/

When I copy: http://i.imgur.com/80gJEXF.png
from outlook (though it also does this with word), and paste into asana, I get: http://i.imgur.com/zpLqiId.png
If I recall correctly, the problem began when you rolled out richtext last year. I'd imagine its due to Word including lots of invisible markup like `<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>`.
I'd think Office is ubiquitous enough that many people have this issue.

But no Markdown support. :(

The refresh looks nice but Asana really needs the ability to create custom fields in tasks and maybe an agile view as well.

Custom fields in tasks will be out in early 2016!

Yeah, they're in beta right now. They work well but we're polishing them before public launch.

I've struggled to really engage with Asana, when I've had to use it in the recent past. I hope these enhancements make their product better, but apart from one part-time role where I have to use it, Asana isn't my first choice. Keyboard shortcuts are good, but often forgotten and the buttons to do the same not always easily found. Formatting options are limited - I'm not aware of a wide range of Markdown being supported. It's just been an OK experience, without making me want to really buy into the ecosystem.
Over the last 12 months I've tried, and paid for, both Trello and ToDoist. They were both OK, in a bit of a limited way. I really wanted a bit more than either of them offered.
After much investigation and demo use with the likes of Taiga (I really, really wanted to like this, but it was just a bit too locked into a quite rigid Scrum and Sprint approach, when sometimes all I need is a To Do list), Tuleap and Restyaboard, I've now installed my own instance of Kanboard (http://kanboard.net/) on the bottom end DI droplet.
It looks a bit ugly out of the box, but an hour of messing about with a little custom CSS and I think it looks as good as anything else.
I really like the ability to switch views between Kanban board, task list, calendar and a basic Gantt view. This keeps, to some extent, everyone working on the projects happy, especially as many of my team members aren't coming from a development background.
Kanboard seems to be actively developed and reasonably bug free.

I also found it difficult to engage with Asana and Trello (also Evernote, less so). You make a good point, its the limited nature, constraints, that stop me from using task managers for all my projects. While, they have worked for specific projects, including personal and team initiatives, my day to day to-dos don't always make it on the board. What I have found is Evernote and OneNote, are more flexible and I can dump more information in a less-structured manner. For me its all about stickiness factor...
In the last 6 months, I have gone full-ham on OneNote, and now use it for team collaboration and personal use. A big part of it is the "open" feel of a blank canvas. At the same time, I can create and save templates for tasks or projects that fall into specific work buckets. Also, for teams, OneNote is free to use and has great iOS and Android apps (webapp is fine too). My current gripe with OneNote is the lack of push-notifications of completed tasks.

Asana is great but a no better tool than Trello or wunderlist. The todo list, project management space is too crowded and the differing methodology for team management makes it hard for any system with opinion to really get a large market share.
I think single function apps in this space is better, like slack for chatting and dropbox for file sharing. Composite tools like Asana is not as flexible over time.

The new Asana design looks a lot better but still feels like it's lacking hierarchy. Kudos to the Asana team though. Big step forward.
We switched from Asana to https://dapulse.com/ awhile back and have been pretty happy with dapulse. Easy navigation, ability to customize status boards, and really opinionated (in a good way) support videos on how to use time-based project management for teams. Not sure if many people on HN are aware of the product, but worth giving it a spin.

Moved to Wunderlist a year ago after years of using Asana (and previously Do), now I'm wondering if it was the right choice. They really put effort into simplifying the experience.

I love asana, been using it for years. The only project management software that really stuck for me.

Me too, it's great for quickly capturing todos (which themselves can have todos). The Harvest integration is great, but I'd really love a Freshbooks timer button.

Lot of talk about Asana Conversations in here. Really hope they've fixed them on mobile. I can't get them to work on the mobile site when I click on links to them in my notification e-mails, I have to either go to the desktop site in my mobile browser and navigate to the conversations or just go to my laptop. It's a major aggravation for me.

I am a big fan of Trello for their simple column view. I've found it to be the most efficient way to understand the state of any of my projects with just a glance.
I've wanted to like Asana for a while, but I always get annoyed by the inability to visualize the lists. Seems like the status quo is unchanged.

Trello has become indispensable to my 12-engineer team in a 40-person startup as a way of visualizing all project from a high-level view and implementing a kanban board to control workload.
When we tried Asana we were never even able to get buy-in from the whole organization, so I can't say for sure how it ultimately would have worked out, but it certainly seemed to lend itself to too many people dumping too many tasks on other people without awareness or respect for overall priorities and the value of focus and procedural workloads for engineers. Perhaps this is a unique problem to tech startups that are only 30% engineers/designers, but in my mind it weighs heavily.

I can barely see a lot of important UI now with the 'light look' (e.g. lots of buttons in task description...how do I add a follower?). How do you even pass accessibility guidelines with this?

Kind of like the new look, more modern but it's only a new css...
some of the polish i'd like to see:
- @ mentions in firefox that works - link from 1 task to another, the linked task should have a mention of the link. - loading the task detail panel is waaaaay to slow - You don't have enough info about your sub tasks in the main view - desktop notifications? - desktop client ?

I used to use Amana, but I left it for Azendoo (and taiga). The main reason is that it was impossible to get a cross-project (workspace) list of my to-dos and everyone's to-dos.
Checking them one by one was quite bad and slow...
I hope they fixed that, but I am far from sure...
(I know I should work on only one project, but life is less than ideal)

Does anyone else feel like the new Asana reminds them of Basecamp.
(That's not a bad thing. I just find it interesting that the market of project management tools are getting ever simpler to the point that they all are essentially converging on becoming just todo lists. Eg wunderkist, basecamp, etc)

Those three circles swirling and flickering everywhere in the screen in the video were so distracting that I couldn't even follow what they were trying to say. I wish the video was much more straight-forward instead of being "mesmerizing".

They weren't trying to say anything.

So, tell us about the tech used? :)

Most of this was in our existing framework Luna, https://asana.com/luna, but some of the newer pieces are using React/TypeScript and the next generation of our reactive query system which we'll be talking about more in the future.

I really like their use of material design in their video. It's not the "Google-esque" material design but it follows the principles. I think that's what is intended and it is indeed very appealing and pleasing.

I have a feeling that whoever made this video wanted to shoehorn the 'Designed by Apple in California' [1] video style into their own Asana version.
It simply does not work, because it uses the dots from the logo (nothing to do with usability, as opposed to Apple who uses the dot theme as representative of touch) as the central 'play theme' and idea behind the motion of the film... Pity they were so superficial.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmV3KMniZuQ

I love the new UI, but I thought the old UI was a great poweruser UI. Problem was, I wasn't in the thing often enough to become a poweruser.
If I was the product manager, I would have made the new UI the default and the old UI a poweruser setting.

does this #newasana twitter contest require entrants to flag their tweets as sponsored?
<edit> link: https://blog.asana.com/2015/09/celebrate-with-us-share-the-n...

Wow is that painful to read
I <3 the #newAsana. Check out what @asana has been up to: https://asana.com
I had to use Asana a year and a half ago for a side project, it was on par with Rally as being the biggest steaming pile of poo I've ever had to use. Hello world-type ticketing systems were better than it.
Having said that maybe the new asana is better. Hopefully there is someone out there giving Jira competition.

Are there burndown charts, yet?

Try hiTask.com for team task management. Unlike asana it does not impose any rules of working.

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