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Comment by chang2301 | Hacker News Reader

This Trello-like design is really good for visually tracking tasks in multiple projects. But I think the core problem of Asana losing users is about its performance. As a web-based platform, Asana's speed is slow enough to make me feel annoyed. When I tested it on Safari, it's even worse.

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My company (~30 people) uses Asana to manage our projects and roadmap.

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.

Exact same experience. There is no lightweight load for read only.

I'm an engineer at Asana. Trust me, they're full aware that performance is the #1 problem with Asana right now.

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/

Thank you, that's good to hear. There is no reason for that fairly simple frontend make my laptop fan to take off.

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.

Thank you for informing us about this. This gives me hope! I've seen Asana change UI multiple times in the past few years when all I want is for them to fix the following (in case you're listening):

- 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.

Finally somebody said it! I am completely with you on this one!

UI/UX is very very outdated. Mobile app is... a nuisance. The overall responsiveness is very mediocre.

At my company we use Asana and Slack for 99% of our online communication.

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.

This becomes a huge problem when someone is linking you multiple tickets and you sit there waiting for asana to load. Even worse, I find that some basic features are still lacking such as the ability to strikethrough text.

Boom! You nailed it buddy! We are having exactly the same problem!

It would help if their API were sane, and I could just write something to grab what I need on the command line or to a plain HTML/CSS page and never interact with their confusing, slow "web app", but it really, really isn't. I suspect that's a symptom of their backend being fairly dumb, which is (a big part of) why the frontend is so damn heavy and sluggish. Seems like an early (poor) architecture decision.

(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)

Let me preface this by saying I'm a developer advocate at Asana, so it's part of my job to try to construct useful stories from this sort of information. If you don't mind me asking, what do you want to see from the API? Text formatting (i.e. the strikethrough) is a huge one that I'd like to see implemented, and there are definitely some, um, ideosyncratic parts of the API (I'm trying to be nice here), but I feel it's way better than screen scraping, which is what it sounds like you're advocating.

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.

IIRC the part the got me to give up on trying to do anything useful with it on the command line was realizing that to get a list of tasks under a team (which we treat as a project) I was going to have to make multiple queries, and it would be even worse if I wanted to show all tasks for a user across all teams (which, again, we treat as projects). It became clear that I was going to have to do a lot of filtering and request-chaining to just view basic things, let alone edit—which I'm guessing the web frontend has to do, which is part of why it's so heavy.

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.

Exactly this! Asana, if you're listening, please drop everything else and completely focus on fixing your performance. I dread clicking on Asana links in emails because I know that Asana is going to take 10 seconds to load the task referred to in the email.

Those of you who like Asana's feature set and list format, is there a much faster alternative?

Asana is listening and we've been focusing a lot on performance - it's a known problem. Hopping into Asana from external links is painful and we know it (I mean, we ourselves are extremely heavy users of Asana, so we see these things too) and are working on it. Many performance changes have already landed, and more are just around the corner, so keep an eye out for things like this to keep getting better in the near future.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I like the feature-set and list-format that Asana has. If the performance issues go away, I don't think there will be any reason for me to consider switching our team to anything else. Looking forward to the improvements you mentioned.

This was the thing that got our team so annoyed that we decided to move away to a different tool (Clubhouse) which is much faster. Too bad, because Asana is quite an interesting and flexible tool, but the performance of Asana is just not acceptable.

We recently moved to Clubhouse.io as well and while some of our team finds that the UI and marketing don't look very modern, the tool itself works really well for us, and is performant

I think Asana tries to upscale. It is easy to make a solution for a single person or a single team, but when you try to create company-wide platform (as Asana tries), it is inevitably leads to complications like Workspaces/Organizations/Projects/Teams. Domain model becomes complex and it is still a monolith, so performance degrades. We have exactly the same problem in Targetprocess. So slowness is kinda explainable.

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.

Yeah, I really liked it feature wise, but it was a shocker on performance.

I don't know why a todo list app can be so slow

Are they in fact losing users?

Damn, I was under the impression that my Firefox was running slow.

Asana is beautiful and an amazing app.

Asana is painfully slow in Firefox. It's not nearly as bad in other browsers in my experience. FF's JavaScript engine still leaves a lot to be desired.

If you read the comment section on the original site they're saying that their devs use Chrome so Asana ends being more optimized for it.

Which is a good reason but a poor excuse.

Yet even in chrome, the slowness of Asana is just too painful for me to use.

I don't know what Chrome they are using, but if I get Asana email to my inbox, I don't want to click it because I know the whole experience is slow slow slow and annoying.

I'm using Chrome too.

I am not having issues of optimisation, even the front page takes like ten minutes to load; "loading unicorns...". I seriously do not know what kind of JS they write. But I remember reading a post by a front end dev which said the following:

"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.

Of course. Your engineers have workstations with 64GB of RAM. So obviously none of your customers are using your software on tablets or chromebooks or the 8-year-old hand-me-down vista-era PC that the IT department decided was all they could spare.

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.

Is Asana losing users? I had no idea they were having retention issues...

Every service loses users, but a strong one gains more than it loses. The net users for Asana is still growing (I work here). What might be more useful to talk about is churn rate, but I don't think that's information that anyone in this thread will have data on.

Am I the only one who thinks Asana's performance is just fine? Do you have hundreds of users and millions of tasks or something? For my startup it's been fine and I'd recommend it to anyone.

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.

There's some things about Asana that annoy me but I was kind of surprised to hear some of these comments. Then I remembered that our team just switched to Asana from Workamajig.

We're evaluating PM solutions and Workmajig is one of the contenders. Do you mind sharing your experience with it?

More than anything it was just a terrible interface.

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.

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