
Boards in Asana - The_Fox
https://blog.asana.com/2016/11/introducing-boards/
======
chang2301
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.

~~~
Periodic
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](https://asana.com/developers/feed/asana-fast-api-open-beta) [2]
[https://blog.asana.com/](https://blog.asana.com/)

~~~
sinatra
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.

------
motdiem
We've been using Asana for a year now, and once you get the hang of it, it's
really super efficient. But I wish Boards where a visualisation on a list
rather of a new object, where we now have to decide for each project wether to
use the list or board format. I'd love to have a system that allowed you to
switch between both.

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....

~~~
flavor8
Youtrack is an unsung hero in this space. It can easily be customized to a
wide variety of workflows, and lets you view the same tickets as boards or
lists. Plus, the Jetbrains team are helpful and responsive to feature
requests.

~~~
jbob2000
I use Youtrack at work and it suffers from being WAY too configurable, to the
point that nobody uses it because you have to click SO MUCH to do anything.

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).

~~~
flavor8
You might have an old version; browser history works fine in version 7.

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.

------
dbg31415
Feature wise... good step for Asana. They now have a feature that Basecamp
doesn't offer... big step for them!

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/](https://www.zenhub.com/)

* Unito - Connect your project management tools and become your team's collaboration hero || [https://unito.io/](https://unito.io/)

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gragas
So how many places do I need to manage my boards now? Trello, GitHub, and now
Asana as well? Why doesn't Slack add this feature while we're at it?

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goatherders
Five years ago I loved asana for its simplicity. I tried it again maybe a year
ago and was shocked at how unfamiliar it felt. Haven't gone back. Just use pen
and Paper now.

~~~
chii
When you say paper, do you mean Dropbox Paper?

~~~
gk1
Not sure if you're joking but given the context ("pen and paper") I'm pretty
sure parent meant physical paper.

~~~
chii
i m only half joking, because the words "Paper" is capitalized in the parent's
comment.

------
sn41
I have tried rather hard to get Asana going for a small team. This was about 2
years ago. I did not find it very attractive. At that time, the inability to
get all the tasks across projects in a single page was frustrating. Is there
anyone who has found Asana an addition over JIRA, for example? A convincing
explanation would be very helpful.

~~~
shostack
Our cross-functional marketing team straddles Trello, Asana, and misc. docs in
Google Drive. I've found that the creatives on the team (writers, designers,
etc.) all hate Asana, but they also don't necessarily love Trello.

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.

~~~
PapaSlug
Nothing is simpler to learn than Trello!

~~~
bshimmin
Yeah, I have to agree with this.

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.

------
ceejay
I am happy to see this. I worked on a series of projects about 2 years ago
where the company used Asana.

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.

------
openclosed
Serious question: How does this make it to the front page?

Unless I missed something, it's a basic feature, and doesn't seem even
remotely innovative.

~~~
jschulenklopper
Technically, because enough people upvote it, up to a level that makes it
visible on the front page.

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."

------
misiti3780
I might try Asana again now that they have this feature. My company is about
to move away from zenhub/github issues to jira but i am looking for decent
alternatives. I hate trello, and asana always seemed feature-bloated + i hate
their new UI.

Any future plans to open source Luna ?

~~~
gk1
A few people recommended clubhouse.io in this thread, so that might be one to
look at.

------
inthewoods
Like the new functionality (we use Asana across our company), but I wish it
wasn't a separate project type. Seems like a no-brainer to just use section
headers as columns and then be able to flip between the text-based version and
a board-based system.

------
was_boring
I like the design, but have they fixed the other issues? The UX is awful to
use, the search hardly finds things I'm interested in and opaque to filter,
and I have a recurring task that has been going for a year and I cannot figure
out how to stop it.

------
npunt
Happy they're diving into boards. Just tried it out and it's pretty barebones.
But that's okay, it'll grow.

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.

~~~
motdiem
> "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. "

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).

------
sprice
We're considering making the jump from Jira. Has anyone else done this? How
did it go? I especially wonder how well Asana deals with estimating tasks.

~~~
tablet
Most likely Asana will be too simple for you then. For example, you can't
assign more that two people on a task and estimates are just custom fields
that are not so ingrained into the system, so you'll have troubles with
reports.

~~~
knz
> For example, you can't assign more that two people on a task

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.

~~~
tablet
This is just a wishful thinking that does not reflect real life.

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conqrr
Borrowing Ideas from Trello, it seems.

~~~
jakubj
"Borrowing" like Instagram "borrowed" stories from Snapchat...

------
tkremer
Avaza has had really nice task Kanban & List views for a long time. It has the
combined functionality of Asana + Trello + Harvest + Freshbooks in one
seamless product.

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unihuman
Notion is going to everybody's lunch! [https://notion.so](https://notion.so)

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jiyinyiyong
Anyone noticed [http://teambition.com](http://teambition.com) ?

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Illniyar
Are they just now getting a kanban board? Or M I missing something?

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asurachadtrot
Asana+Trello

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keeptrying
Very bad sign when you start copying other companies in your space.

~~~
chang2301
Disagree. Take Apple copied Android's drop down notification as the best
example. And Apple did not go down after that.

~~~
geniium
Apple _is_ going down!

------
mariust
Have you heard about www.paymoapp.com - they have boards for quite a long time
now, also Gantt is in private beta. The speed is quite good. I am using it for
more than 2 years now.

