Boards in Asana

https://blog.asana.com/2016/11/introducing-boards/

by The_Fox • 10 years ago

135 87 10 years ago

blog.asana.com

asurachadtrot• 10 years ago

Asana+Trello

Illniyar• 10 years ago

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

conqrr• 10 years ago

Borrowing Ideas from Trello, it seems.

jakubj• 10 years ago

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

sprice• 10 years ago

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.

tablet4• 10 years ago

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.

knz2• 10 years ago

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.

keeptrying• 10 years ago

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

grzm• 10 years ago

"Great artists steal."

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.

chang23012• 10 years ago

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

geniium• 10 years ago

Apple is going down!

rhizome• 10 years ago

Seems to be working well for LinkedIn.

chang23012• 10 years ago

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.

kimshibal• 10 years ago

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

shostack3• 10 years ago

Are they in fact losing users?

phasecode• 10 years ago

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.

ktamiola2• 10 years ago

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

ashark3• 10 years ago

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)

tablet4• 10 years ago

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.

thewhitetulip2• 10 years ago

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

Asana is beautiful and an amazing app.

cauterized3• 10 years ago

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.

ktamiola2• 10 years ago

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.

ashark3• 10 years ago

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.

edo• 10 years ago

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.

spraak• 10 years ago

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

glennos• 10 years ago

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

losvedir• 10 years ago

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.

kapauldo• 10 years ago

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

theSpaceOctopus2• 10 years ago

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.

razvanh• 10 years ago

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

s3r3nity• 10 years ago

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

Periodic2• 10 years ago

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.

sinatra3• 10 years ago

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?

praecipula2• 10 years ago

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.

Periodic2• 10 years ago

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/

angry-hacker2• 10 years ago

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.

sinatra3• 10 years ago

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.

gtsteve• 10 years ago

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.

sn41• 10 years ago

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.

shostack3• 10 years ago

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.

kayoone• 10 years ago

how about good old basecamp ?

PapaSlug• 10 years ago

Nothing is simpler to learn than Trello!

RunawayGalaxy• 10 years ago

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.

cygned• 10 years ago

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.

npunt• 10 years ago

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.

motdiem2• 10 years ago

"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).

openclosed• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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."

the_duke• 10 years ago

Probably because plenty of people are using Asana, and so are interested...

goatherders• 10 years ago

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.

chii2• 10 years ago

When you say paper, do you mean Dropbox Paper?

gk12• 10 years ago

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

knz2• 10 years ago

Just use pen and Paper now.

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...

motdiem2• 10 years ago

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....

jeromeflipo• 10 years ago

Check out Kantree.io

flavor82• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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).

23andwalnut• 10 years ago

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.

jacklionheart• 10 years ago

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.)

tablet4• 10 years ago

But I wish Boards where a visualisation on a list rather of a new object

Targetprocess solves that, but it is heavier than Asana.

tkremer• 10 years ago

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.

mariust• 10 years ago

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.

ceejay• 10 years ago

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.

jiyinyiyong• 10 years ago

Anyone noticed http://teambition.com ?

dbg31415• 10 years ago

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/

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

inthewoods• 10 years ago

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.

misiti3780• 10 years ago

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 ?

gk12• 10 years ago

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

was_boring• 10 years ago

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.

gragas• 10 years ago

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?

unihuman• 10 years ago

Notion is going to everybody's lunch! https://notion.so

Boards in Asana

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