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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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).
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.
You can do this in Duet (http://duetapp.com), but it's self-hosted. Pretty sure Flow also lets you switch back and forth between boards/lists. Have to imagine a bunch of other apps have it too.
You will be able to toggle projects between Board and List view fairly soon (Note that the holiday season will push back the release cycle in general for a bit.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, a good chunk of the team, including creatives who are more visually inclined, hate Trello. I personally like it for some things, but it lacks the ability to do more complex project management and have it roll up into a much more simplified "executive level" view. You basically have to create a new board for that and update it separately. Blech.
- 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.
I love it for organizing my personal todo lists and daily tasks, but I've had the same experience as you with trying to use it in a team setting. We use Trello, which isn't perfect either. I guess this is Asana's attempt at closing the gap.
I have been using it with a development team for about two months, a year ago. And - compared to the alternatives - I've found it extremely unintuitive and confusing.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
How can be alienating half of America by taking this stand, instead of remaining silent on the point and a maintaining a non-ideological product/business stance, be a good idea for them?
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.
