Forms are great for work intake and bad for surveys!

English Forum Tips and Tricks
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Carla from Asana here with a short, but :hot_pepper: hot take on Asana forms:

The TL;DR: Forms are :white_check_mark: great for work intake and :cross_mark: bad for surveys!

:thinking: Why:

Form submissions generate tasks within a specific project. They’re great for making sure you get all the information you need to take action on the information that’s submitted – for example, gathering requirements for a creative request, getting specs about a bug, or gathering details for a procurement request. In each of these cases, the form submission represents a discrete piece of work that needs to be actioned on.
Surveys, on the other hand, don’t necessarily represent actionable work! Let’s say I host a team retreat and want to get feedback about how it went. I want to gather the same information from each person (tempting to use a form), but unlike actual survey tools, it’s not easy to analyze the trends of that feedback across multiple submissions (e.g. see all responses to a single question in one place). You could create some formula custom fields and dashboard charts in the project to get this info, but survey tools (like Typeform, Google Forms, etc.) will generate these analyses automatically – that’s what they’re built for!

The edge case I’d highlight here is using Forms to collect customer feedback – in this case, you might actually want to consider taking action or follow up on each piece of feedback, so an Asana form might be a good tool in this case.

Discussion, disagreement, and debate are welcome! How do YOU use Asana forms?

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Of course I agree, and it’s an important distinction. Thanks, @Carla_Bagdonas!

Perhaps one more edge case in favor of an Asana form (with connected custom fields, dashboard charts, maybe formulas, and maybe section numeric tallies in list view) for a survey would be if it’s not too complex and you are sure to only require minimal analysis . . . and your team loves to use Asana wherever feasible!

Thanks,

Larry

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I sometimes use Asana form for surveys, its true that the analysis is not the same as more native survey tools, but i discovered that if you format your question in a specific way you could use the dashboard tab to visualise your results. I try to use the same answer options for all the questions (yes/no/maybe or agree/disagree) = simple options.

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Interesting post.
I do agree that there are certain tools for surveys that facilitate simpler data analysis and visualisation.

Like @lpb I also agree that the use of custom fields comes in very handy so for example when sending a feedback to the team for the end of year evaluation survey it would be easy to set up in Asana as well + you can prepare it as template for future surveys to come.

Another point I’d like to highlight is that the choice often depends on the specific team or situation. For instance, if my goal is to introduce a team to Asana, encouraging them to explore its valuable features, I would opt for an Asana form over other tools.

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