Boards in Asana
blog.asana.com
blog.asana.com
Once the app is loaded the performance is okay, but the thing that kills me is when someone sends me a link to a task, or I click on one of their email notifications, it takes so long to bootstrap the whole thing! I'm literally just clicking the link to get a bit of info about that one task, and it boots up the whole SPA, which takes 5-6 seconds, only for me to close the tab a bit later.
Is this not a common use case? How is there not a lightweight version that loads just the task? I mean, the email notifications load a view of just the task, but it still goes through the whole "* Shearing Pigeons, * Slipping and Sliding, * Riding Unicorns" splash screen.
I don't even know what a work around is. If someone sends me a link to a task I can copy the URL bits into my asana tab that I keep open, but the email notifications don't expose those very easily so I just end up clicking those.
I love all the features of asana (we use the tags a lot, and I wrote a pretty nifty dev tool that integrates GitHub and Asana for us), but the performance for this one case just drives me up the wall.
The major engineering focus at Asana right now is performance. It has been for a while and they're just starting to roll things out with the new, faster, backend and UI. I think you'll start to see significant improvements soon as the investments they've been making start to roll out. It's already started rolling out to some customers, and the API updates just got turned[1], on for example. Those changes are going to be making it into the UI soon.
If you don't like Asana performance, give it a few months and check back or keep an eye on their blog[2]. Big changes are coming on that front.
[1] https://asana.com/developers/feed/asana-fast-api-open-beta [2] https://blog.asana.com/
- Performance: Lower resource usage and much faster loading of tasks from external links (like from emails).
- Get rid of the random "disconnected / reconnecting" notifications which disable the entire app for a few seconds.
- Allow adding attachments by drag-and-drop.
- Sometimes attachments don't preview till you reload the page.
Maybe I'm nostalgic but I miss web 1.0 apps. Just send a request and wait. Is that javascript bloat really necessary? I understand if it makes product feel faster, more usable. More often than not, it doesn't.
Also, it would be nice if asana would finally support android share intents.
UI/UX is very very outdated. Mobile app is... a nuisance. The overall responsiveness is very mediocre.
I hate Asana. It's like trying to be productive by screen sharing someone else's cluttered folder-centric Windows 95 desktop "organization system". Running on a 386SX. This despite some smart folks putting a fair amount of effort into figuring out how to best use it.
(yes, there are some command line tools that people have written, but they're too limited, for this reason, unless something's changed in the last ~6 months since I last looked at them)
And as for the backend, I wouldn't call it dumb, exactly, but it was implemented in a way that would help spur early growth of the company - and it succeeded in doing that, so it wasn't a poor decision from that point of view. We really, really do know that we've outgrown it now, and are hard at work replacing it with something better. That happens at just about every company as it scales. The frontend is constantly getting faster as we adopt the rewrite, and the faster backend for the API has just entered open beta, as a matter of fact; you're welcome to try it: https://asa.na/fast-api.
Glancing at the docs, it looks like they've gotten better in the last few months, which is great. Maybe some of that stuff's been fixed. I'll take another look at it when I've got some time.
More broadly, there are three things that would remove nearly all my complaints about Asana:
1) Clicking on a link to a task from outside Asana should bring up an ultra-light view of just that task (and its comments and such) that loads in under 200ms—under 100ms, ideally. If it must be read-only for this to happen, that's OK. Provide a link to open it in the full "app".
2) A light (think: basic-html-mode Gmail) version of the app itself. Most of the dynamic features are liabilities for me. Drag-and-drop happens accidentally more often than intentionally. Sometimes all the JS steps on its own tail and makes my cursor, and my typing, go places I don't want it (happened this week again, actually), along with other periodic, odd glitches. Editing task titles and such in-place happens more often by accident than on purpose. Every time I mess around in Asana I leave not certain whether I've mucked up the project without noticing. I'd much, much, much rather have a very fast-loading low-memory interface where such things happened only when I wanted them to. I don't mind full page loads if necessary (see again: basic html Gmail, which is faster than regular Gmail and certainly Inbox, most of the time, despite frequent full-page loads). I'd be happier with a zero-javascript interface, really, since the JS features mostly get in the way. However, with how much logic I suspect is housed in the frontend to achieve what's seen in the "app", this may be asking a lot.
3) Search. It needs to do The Right Thing by default. It should search the project I'm currently in unless I tell it otherwise. It should support inline filters, with auto-suggestions (as in Slack's search) so I don't have to clicky-clicky-typey-clicky-typey-clicky-typey-clicky to accomplish even fairly simple searches.
4) (BONUS POINTS!) Slack-style @ referencing, so I can just type it and don't have to use the autocomplete list to make it take (rather than just adding the text literally and not referencing the person I was trying to, which is what happens now if I don't select someone from the autocomplete list)
5) (BONUS POINTS 2!) It'd be nice if the "Inbox" displayed something like a colored diff-view of each item when it's selected, to make it easier to see what's actually changed. Clearing my Asana inbox takes more time than it ought to.
6) (BONUS POINTS 3!) Add an option to reverse-sort and never collapse any part of comments sections on tasks.
Those of you who like Asana's feature set and list format, is there a much faster alternative?
However, on my opinion products like Trello and Asana will have hard time trying to scale. Most likely we will see new products that will take this segment by storm, like Slack in work chats niche. All current solutions are not good for organizations.
Asana is beautiful and an amazing app.
"I went to interview for a front end position at a big company and in the interview, I wrote a very optimum JS code for something and I got laughed at, the interviewer saying in this era of 64GB rams and stuff why do you need to bother about optimising JS"
sorry, can't find the source.
And of course your software is the only thing they have to use that computer for, so it's perfectly fine to consume every last scrap of resources it has.
I miss the 2004-era web, where the most resource-consuming webpage was the one where some idiot posted a dozen thumbnail-size images but forgot to actually thumbnail his camera's enormous 2MP images.
I'm using Chrome too.
The startup time is a bit of a pain I guess but I only launch it once or twice a day.
And it's a shame that it's totally hopeless at bug tracking, because I'd love to dump JIRA.
The interface that is shown on the website is not the actual interface, it's a Flash app and looks like it hasn't been updated for about 10 years.
They have been working on a new version, but it seems like they have been working on it for quite some time now. Some features of the "Platinum" (non-flash) app were slowly being rolled out when we left, but the bulk of the app was still Flash. We stayed with it for about 6 months, and finally moved away from it about 3 or 4 months ago, this year.
I'm sorry, I know that's not very specific or concrete, I only tracked time to projects and couldn't stand it, but it was collectively hated throughout the company, especially by the PM's.
I'd suggest staying clear, or definitely do the trial before committing. Asana has been a breath of fresh air for us.
And I'll echo the comments about Asana being to resource greedy. A combination of appear.in + asana will quickly bring chrome on its knee on my macbook pro, to the point that I'll sometime load it on my phone during meetings to avoid straining my machine....
Every developer we hire has to sit and watch 10mins of videos so they know how to use it, yet every other issue track I've used has been immediately obvious as to how it is used.
It does some really annoying things too, like hijack the history state of your browser, so pressing back and forward doesn't work as you'd expect (they have their own back button in the app, you're "supposed" to use that).
You have to click far less than with asana or jira, so I don't know how you guys have it set up, but it's far from stock. Click to board (or set board as default view), filter, move tickets. That's all there is to it.
It's leagues more efficient to use than jira.
Targetprocess solves that, but it is heavier than Asana.
Usability... slow load, sluggish drag... not loving it.
UX... I freakin' hate it when boards don't show label names. I'm supposed to know what all my labels are via color? No way, what's this orange, vs slightly darker orange?
Gonna stick with GitHub and ZenHub... and Unito for clients that just have to have Asana.
* ZenHub - Agile GitHub Project Management Software || https://www.zenhub.com/
* Unito - Connect your project management tools and become your team's collaboration hero || https://unito.io/
To be fair, isn't the whole point of using something like Asana to collaborate with a team? Pen and paper doesn't scale well...
So I'm hunting for a system that is visually simple and can take only a few seconds to learn and use. I just came across DaPulse (no affiliation) and the screenshots and video seem interesting, but I need to play with it to see if it supports the various things we need (multiple milestones, dependencies, owners, and a good way of rolling that up to an executive dashboard that gets rid of all the minutiae). Also, that is one of the worst brand names I've seen in a while, but hey, if it works who cares.
The problem with project management tools is that if you can't get a team to use them religiously, they can do more harm than good. The second things start getting sent in email or posted in Slack and NOT captured in the tool, things break down. And if people forget to check things in the tool to stay on top of their notifications, items needing responses, etc. and update their respective pieces, then you might as well use nothing.
I have a long-term client who is a smart guy but is basically a bit averse to learning new technology - he's good with Excel from a previous time in his life, but feels now like his skills are better used elsewhere (which is not an unreasonable position to be in, sometimes). We tried him with Pivotal Tracker, and he did make the effort to use it, somewhat, but it never meshed well with how he wanted to work and he kept doing odd things like creating additional empty tasks as "dividers", which was infuriating. Then we tried him with Jira - he never got anywhere with it; too much UI, too many tabs, too many things to fill in, and the hour-long walkthrough I tried to do was just too much listening.
Finally, entirely independently of me, he started using Trello. He got it immediately, with no assistance, and loves it - he even uses it for non-work things now.
- it groups teams into projects - so if you start a new project, you have to invite people to that project and each projet is very isolated (aside from some global feeds that show stuff from all projects)
- if you try to use a project as a wrapper around teams, you don't have any sub tasks under tasks or a way to create a mini project within a project -- you can create task groups, and they can kind of be a project within a project, but they're a bit too simplified.
- tasks only have two states: done and not done. this is not very accommodating for any kind of a QA process, reviewing etc. Unless you create multiple tasks for each individual task, or you use the task groups to move tasks between them. (or use person-assignment to imply state)
- it can be difficult to drill down and figure out things about a task - eg. when it was created and who created it etc. This may be some enterprise feature I'm not aware of.
on a side note, i've seen some very buggy behavior when moving tasks between task groups, but that's probably just a bug that can be fixed.
It is probably just because of the way I think, and the way I go about solving problems, but I felt Asana (original) was ... underwhelming to say the least.
Trello I immediately fell in love with when I learned about it, and have used it a ton now and still have the same feelings about it to this day.
Unless I missed something, it's a basic feature, and doesn't seem even remotely innovative.
And it appears that this feature, although not new in the world of Trello, Microsoft Teams, GitLab cards, is new for Asana: "With this initial version of Boards, visual thinkers can now organize and track their work from within Asana."
Any future plans to open source Luna ?
The big issue though is Asana still has a big design & usability problem, which is especially pronounced in comparison with their new competitor Trello.
Visually, Asana has exceedingly low contrast between items and favors shades of very light grey, which is only made worse with small fonts and icons, and non-hidpi displays. Greyscale UIs are okay if color is used sparingly on key actions, but even the colors don't make much sense - yellow upgrade button, red/orange project adder (which, unlike in the blog post, doesn't even present me with the option to add boards), pink (in my case) user presence circle, blue dot for a task mark. It's all kind of a jumble when starting out, and the most straightforward action (add a task) is entirely invisible until mousing over.
The info hierarchy is also totally puzzling in Asana - what is an entirely different project(? not sure the lingo) versus a within-project 'project' versus todos and other stuff in there. They're all jumbled together, unlabeled, in both top nav and user presence menu, and it makes me think twice before doing something like inviting a collaborator (because I don't know what view I'm inviting them to). Plus the tasks/inbox/dashboard tabs then have sub tabs in them that don't make much sense as to why they're there. And view changes are slow. It looks like an attempt at simplicity that misses the mark on which things to simplify.
Meanwhile Trello delineates the various hierarchies (boards, lists, cards) very well. Trello has clear distinction between cross-board stuff situated in the top nav (boards, search, trello logo, user presence), followed by within-board contents in the second to top nav (board name, star, privacy, and link for menu), followed by lists and cards. Trello also has a board index where you can see all your boards and which ones are part of which organizations.
To charitably interpret this, I'd say that Trello is designed to support many boards for different things, whereas Asana's interface is built around a single main project(?), and doesn't scale well to many unrelated projects. Trello has a low barrier to entry but lacks detailed collaborative project management tools out of the box, and focuses on an ecosystem of powerups, where Asana has more features but you're stuck with all of them and has high initial cognitive load.
This means Trello is a good tool for casual usage, and can scale to some degree of complex projects. Asana looks like it is made for complex projects run in a particular way with lots of information density, but introduces too many concepts and lays them out too haphazardly to be useful for casual projects or casual usage. I think that introduces a big friction point for adoption across teams, as it doesn't do service to users that aren't interacting with the tool super frequently. I guess another way to put it is Asana feels enterprise-y in execution. Meanwhile Trello feels like a true consumer product, and like Slack, is part of a breed of consumer-to-enterprise plays that are nailing it by starting simple.
I really like that Asana is acknowledging in this post that there are many different processes users adopt to tackle projects, as overly opinionated designs in the productivity space will limit addressable market significantly. Adding more views & workflows that all are tied to your data is great. Wish the UI/UX were a lot better.
This feels very true to me. A big part of becoming effective with Asana for us was deciding which concepts to use, and how (like: decide what are sections for, and stick to it), which we don't (like conversations).
You can add as many people as you want at the project level but always assumed their philosophy was that that one person owns/completes individuals tasks/sub-tasks.
I agree with the sentiment if that's the only thing you're doing, that you have nothing else in your business model than copying what someone else is doing. That's not necessarily the case here.