I have been a long time Asana user have used Asana to run a small creative agency for close to 10 years now. Despite the many great additions and improvements to the platform, I think there are fundamental platform flaws that prevent the tool from being effective as a single source of truth for our work an allow for true asynchronous work culture.
I’m going to attempt to break this down by core section / UX and welcome any feedback on workarounds from the community:
1) Inbox, Notifications, and Updates are The Achilles Heel of Asana
As a business owner involved in client facing and internal responsibilities, my inbox is utterly and completely unusable. I could literally spend my entire working day catching up on my inbox. Here’s what I think the inbox and notifications system needs:
- Much more granular filtering, and the ability to save these filters (filter by workspace, portfolio, project, etc.)
- Much more granular control over what triggers a notification
- A better way to see threaded asynchronous conversations about tasks and topics in my inbox
- The inbox has so much noise and context about each task that I cannot easily skim, prioritize, and stay up to date on what’s new without getting completely inundated with an overwhelm of tiny, granular updates, so I miss bigger picture important updates that I actually care about (ex: Karen added 30 tasks to a project and assigned them to me? Now I have 30 items in my inbox to sort through).
2) No ability to see a feed of updates within a project view
If I want to know what’s changed on a project since I last visited, I have no way of doing that right now. I can see a feed up changes per task, but no meta view or feed of updates at a project level. This is obvious, core functionality for PM software. Basecamp handles this very well with a simple “catch up per project” and “activity feed” for the entire workspace
3) My Tasks is completely overwhelming
My tasks also has very limited filtering. I should easily be able to filter my tasks by project, workspace, portfolio, etc. and save those filters. I should be able to search within my tasks without having to do an advanced search.
I should be able to filter out tasks that were not created by me.
4) Projects need better sorting, filtering, and searching
There’s been some decent progress here recently, but I still only have the ability to sort and filter and save a single view, which then changes the view for everyone. I want to be able to sort, filter, and customize project views and save these views for easy future faceless. I want to search within a project without using advanced search and switching to a new view to do so.
I am aware that there may be feature requests and threads for some of these individual issues, but I am lumping these together because I think they collectively represent a critical missing mesh of functionality that could really improve the usability and effectiveness of Asana for the entire user base. I am aware that this will likely not lead to any meaningful change in the product roadmap but I feel as a long time customer I should voice my feedback nonetheless.
I do welcome any hacks or workarounds that others are using to get around any of these limitations of the app.
