Asana was the first program I ever used that made me feel old. But not in the actually rather good sense of it making me say "wow, they can do this now?"
Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless.
There are many examples in Asana of this. Each, taken alone, is banal: kind of annoying, but maybe not too bad. Taken together, though, we have something that a nicer person than I wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, but I'm just not that nice of a person.
You nailed it. Their UI and UX are both just really bad but it's a kind of hidden complexity that sneaks up on you and you don't realize it until you actually start using the product. They also had a horrible (like, really....really bad) mobile app for the longest time and even their new one uses very very weird UX paradigms for no clear reason.
My favorite example of their strange UI/UX pattern is trying to make a new task header in list mode. There isn't a dedicated button for this — or is there?! Try to hover your pointer on "Add Task" and a new button magically appears next to it, on:hover, called "Add Section"! Just like 1999 all over again, but without the GIFs and marquees.
They seem to have intentionally followed this design pattern, as hidden buttons often appear on hover next to adjacent buttons. I can't imagine how touchscreen laptop users feel using Asana. I won't even go into how their calendar view hides weekends, and how our team spent minutes finding the button to show weekends during a meeting.
> I can't imagine how touchscreen laptop users feel using Asana.
As a digital immigrant that hasn't jumped on touch devices, I have noticed there is a shift to more "implicit" interfaces with touch devices. Not much screen space to show things, so don't waste it on menus until they are needed. I suspect that touchscreen using digital natives don't have too much of an issue with this, but I've also never used Asana.
I really don't like how you have to be connected to the internet to use the mobile app. I'm a diehard asana user, but this kills it for me when I'm on airplanes. I'm on airplanes 2x a week.
What people forget is that JIRA is a more complex product. Probably by orders of magnitude. There is SO MUCH you can do with JIRA and so many different integrations that while it's very clunky, I feel they don't get enough credit for managing all that complexity in some manner that is at last somewhat sane. In fact, clunkiness comes with that territory of complexity, there's just really no way around it (well, this is a simplifying statement, but the point is that different tradeoffs would have had to be made).
That's why a lot of JIRA to Asana comparisons don't really hold up. The problem arises when a small team that needs a quick and simple to-do list start using JIRA and then compare it to other solutions which do probably 1/100th of what JIRA does. If you don't need the cruft that JIRA comes with, then that's fine...but there are genuinely orgs that do need it.
Now I'm no fan of JIRA. I don't really love it, and I fall under the camp that tolerates it. However, even then I can appreciate it for what it is and what it means to do. They can do better of course...but we can't simply compare directly between something like JIRA and Asana.
> Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless.
This captures the way I felt using Asana for the first time as well, about three years ago as a (not-that-old) college student. It was really hard to internalize its expected data model/flow. My team ended up settling on Trello. I've always figured that Asana was meant for larger teams and more complicated projects than I've been exposed to, but it certainly felt confusing as part of a small team.
I feel like Asana would be a mess with a large team of people (say 50+) marching towards one goal. I find it good for small teams. Once you need to roll up higher level reports that go out to C-Suite type management for the status of a major project, it starts to fall apart.
Try to use their API. It's braindead. You want to get the latest tasks? The ones they show you on their page by default? Sorry, you'll have to get ALL tasks, in random order .
You basically have to reimplement the Asana's server to be able to use their API.
we found it insanely powerful but hit a lot of snags trying to see an easy view of tasks; especially with team members on the move switching between online and offline.
Ended up writing chrome extension[1] which hit a nerve with a lot of other people as well. We got thank yous from as as africa where teams are using asana with patchy connectivity.
I'd be interested in what you liked with other task trackers that felt bewildering in Asana? I've been using computers long enough to remember when window managers were a big innovation but my experience with Asana was the opposite. It was so easy to enter tasks and set them up compared to JIRA or other tools I'd used that it felt like Asana got out of the way and I could just get back to working. The only things I miss are referable ids and some of JIRA's reporting/querying capabilities.
The very first version of Asana I encountered was pretty intuitive, and the UI made it easy to just glide through editing my tasklist.
I stopped using it for something else, and when I came back a couple years later it was the opposite - kind of clunky, had to poke around a lot to try to do something.
I don't know what happened, but I'd love to have that first version back.
Exactly, this. I loved Asana when it first came out. Advocated for it successfully at two organization I was employed at. Couple years down the line, it's gotten needlessly bloated and complex.
From the very start, I've called Asana the Lisp of task management tools. The problem is all of the founders and early employees of Asana are insanely smart so they prioritized power over learnability at every design step. There's a huge amount of conceptual complexity to absorb and very little support in the way to help you do so.
Like Lisp, once you're over the hump, you become a rabid devotee but it's culturally not friendly to newbies and probably never will be.
My conversations with current and ex Asana employees have all reported essentially that my take is accurate.
i find that for group-sized tasks a google spreadsheet and some kind of issue tracking system is fine (zendesk, github, etc.)
it's more about the day-to-day management of people and goals than the management of data in whatever system you choose. the data just needs to be easy to find and share.
I have noticed a few of these things, like sections, or the whole left pane. But it was still the best product my team tried out. What examples are you talking about particularly?
Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless.
There are many examples in Asana of this. Each, taken alone, is banal: kind of annoying, but maybe not too bad. Taken together, though, we have something that a nicer person than I wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, but I'm just not that nice of a person.