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UI/UX is very very outdated.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)
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.
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.
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).
Targetprocess solves that, but it is heavier than Asana.
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 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.
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...
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."
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.
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).
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/
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.
