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Comment by polysaturate | Hacker News Reader

For myself, using Asana falls into the the don't love, but don't hate, category. The UI is pretty nice, but I always feel it just doesn't have enough teeth for complex project/collaboration. I mean, I see it has a lot of features to facilitate that need(project, hierarchical tasks, attachments, commenting), but it doesn't convey 'serious business'.

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As a very heavy day to day user, my biggest three complaints are:

1. Ability to "lock" a row. We often build lists in Asana that are not meant to be tasks. It's great for project planning or status boards. The problem is everything in Asana is very easily checked off or moved, which sometimes can happen by accident. This provides a feeling of fleetingness that I think makes some people (especially super detail oriented project managers) nervous.

2. Native Apps. I really need a great official OSX native app. The iOS app, while it has gotten better, has always felt like an afterthought to the company.

3. Notifications. This is the main reason I want a solid OSX app. I need notifications to work really well. If something is important and needs my attention, I need to instantly know about it (and knowing about it via a push notification on my phone isn't good enough). Slack has cut down on email usage for us, like many, significantly. I don't check email as much now, so I can't rely on email notifications for our primary project management tool.

Overall Asana is great. I always end up going back to it after using other tools. I do agree however there are a few small things that would help to make it feel a bit more "grown up".

My experience is pretty similar. Asana is fine, and I find other tools generally less effective. The ui is convoluted though, especially since they introduced conversation. The way documents are integrated isn't great either - I wish there was a way to share team docs or project docs without sticking them into tasks or conversations.

And basic things like assigning tasks or moving them across sections take forever in the mobile apps - which is quite painful.

But when you define a clear process within a team, which features to use or avoid, it's way more powerful than email, and more inclusive than ticketing systems

So you use asana and slack? As a developer with a small company that is looking at messaging options, would you mind explaining your use scenarios for these two, in my view, relatively similar apps?

Agreed. We were using Asana for project management for a long time, but weren't happy.

It's too cluttered and dense, with too many possibilities for accidental edits (you nearly always have a cursor in some field) and very little sense of modality. You feel like you're in a spreadsheet. Which is not a good model for a project management system.

Personally I was also extremely unhappy with the WYSIWYG contenteditable editor they used for rich text fields; very error-prone (undo didn't really work properly) and almost useless for exchanging code snippets.

We ended up switching to Clubhouse [1] (a Pivotal/Trello clone with a Slack aesthetic), and our project manager is now much happier with the pipeline-oriented task view, which is something that was missing from Asana. Text fields are Markdown, which is a huge improvement. There's nothing revolutionary about Clubhouse, it's just plain and nice.

Asana wasn't terrible, but it wasn't good. A bit surprised that YC is bothering with them.

[1] https://clubhouse.io/

Oh man. One of the biggest pet peeves of mine about Asana is the "too many possibilities for accidental edits". Classic example of "Haste makes waste."

Clubhouse looks pretty nice.

Did the standup style overview ("Make stand-ups easy—or totally redundant.") work for your team?

I'm not the project manager, but I believe it's been very useful. During our stand-up we mostly just go through the "ice box" as well as current tasks.

I'm a daily user as well, and the performance really irks me, especially their mobile app. One of the most important things for an app like this is easy input for later triage. I almost always end up swearing whenever I try to input something in their mobile app.

Perf is our #1 priority right now. We've had a big team tackle the fundamentals for the last two years, and we're rolling things out in the coming months. I'm personally leading the team that's rebuilding our API on top of this new infrastructure. We're still early in that process, early signs are that we can get perf down to around 100ms. The mobile apps are built on top of the API, so this would make them fast too.

Interesting argument. I'm using Trello and many people say something similiar about it, but my researched always showed me that those people either don't know how to use Trello to the full potential or they are generally bad at organising.

What would make Asana convey "real business" ?

I think it feels as though it was created as a very simple task tracker at first, and project/collab features were tacked on later.

Each to their own, I suppose :)

I've quickly reviewed Asana, and actually found it quite complex.

Trello works nicely with our small team. People don't generally have full projects assigned to them, so a Trello card for a specific task to be executed works well.

It's great for tracking high-level objectives, for personal to-dos, and for collaborating with business users.

My biggest complaint (aside from the half dozen ways the UI breaks in Safari), especially when using it as a ticketing system, is that it doesn't have persistent item IDs that are short enough for a human to remember and refer to easily.

Oh, and repeating to-dos that skip weekends would be nice.

I want to like Asana because I feel like it has the team and momentum to get project/task mgmt "right" but, wow, is it a struggle. And it really doesn't even do much.

I don't get why project/task mgmt is such a hard tool to build usably. It's mostly glorified crud with some smart views and notifications.

I think the problem is that like calendaring or messaging, people have very different beliefs about "right".

The problem is precisely that it's not CRUD. It's a workflow problem. Many, perhaps most, CRUD systems secretly have some workflow under the hood, but they can get by with a few special-case hacks and a couple of quick fixes and call it a day. Workflow is much harder. I think it's because of the infinite recursion; for any action, I may want preconditions, postconditions, notification, permissions, and then I'd like each of those things to be actions that can recursively have those things, plus I'd like arbitrary relationships between all these things. There's an enormous tension between carving out a sufficient subset to satisfy most of your customers, without simply shipping them what is basically a domain-specific programming language too complicated for anyone but professional computer programmers to use.

Asana shows a simpler way to achieve a goal IMO. It always feels a bit "fundamental" but it never disappoints you, which is very frequent when you work upon a "serious" tool.

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