
Meet the new Asana - rayshan
https://blog.asana.com/2015/09/the-new-asana/
======
state
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.

~~~
dcposch
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

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colinramsay
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?

~~~
gkop
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).

------
jtemplin
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.

~~~
trhway
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.

------
dreamdu5t
> 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.

~~~
chuckcode
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.

------
misiti3780
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)

~~~
ne0n
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.

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

~~~
ne0n
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?

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

------
chuckcode
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.

------
pbreit
Despite how crowded this category is, the options still all seem to be pretty
rough.

Does anyone really like their project management software?

~~~
lemevi
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.

~~~
timjahn
This is exactly why I created Donald
([http://getDonald.com](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.

------
GordyMD
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?

------
pspeter3
We're really excited about this launch, it's been months in the making.

~~~
jhpaul
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.

~~~
pspeter3
When was the last time you've tried? We support some amount of formatting
[https://blog.asana.com/2014/06/rich-
text/](https://blog.asana.com/2014/06/rich-text/)

~~~
jhpaul
When I copy: [http://i.imgur.com/80gJEXF.png](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](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.

------
phillc73
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/](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.

~~~
fumar
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.

------
rw2
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.

------
simple10
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/](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.

------
lemiffe
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.

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

~~~
juddlyon
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.

------
cwyers
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.

------
andhess
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.

~~~
dasil003
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.

------
pookeh
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?

------
eMerzh
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 ?

------
jbk
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)

------
tiffanyh
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)

------
volaski
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".

~~~
awakeasleep
They weren't trying to say anything.

------
cdnsteve
So, tell us about the tech used? :)

~~~
pspeter3
Most of this was in our existing framework Luna,
[https://asana.com/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.

------
mholt
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.

------
sarreph
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmV3KMniZuQ)

------
threefour
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.

------
shaanr
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...](https://blog.asana.com/2015/09/celebrate-with-us-share-the-newasana-
for-a-free-shirt/)

~~~
cwilkes
Wow is that painful to read

 _I <3 the #newAsana. Check out what @asana has been up to:
[https://asana.com](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.

------
rocky1138
Are there burndown charts, yet?

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

