When we first heard about forms my team hit the roof with excitement. This was going to save us a TON of time and absolutely justified a move up to the Business tier. In the end, the idea is very exciting, but until a few changes (especially two biggies) are made we find we simply cannot use them.
Multiple Forms per Project
Each of our projects have multiple things we could use a form for - only being able to do a single form for an entire project drops the utility of this tool from almost-immeasurable to cute-but-basically-useless. We would like to have different forms for entering notes during different kinds of meetings. A form for creative briefs at the start of the project. A form for gathering information from a client. A different form for gathering other kinds of information from the client at a different stage of the project. etc. There are dozens of ways forms could be used to cut-down labor and make asana more valuable to our workflow.
Ability to Save Forms as Templates
The lack of this feature is what ultimately killed Forms for us. We spent a great deal of time customizing a form that we figured could be used for half a dozen different things as a workaround until a project could have multiple forms. It wasn’t perfect but it would get us by and increase our productivity, efficiency, consistency. Then we went to add that form to all our 30+ projects and…nope - absolutely no way to copy forms across projects.
We thought we’d be clever by making a form on a new project, make that project a template, and then rebuilt all our projects from the template but the form doesn’t clone when you build a project from a template. As far as we have found there is no way to duplicate a form across projects, meaning each time we onboard a new project we would have to spend a bunch of time rebuilding that form. We need to create efficiencies, not add steps, so at this time this isn’t an option for us.
Additional other thoughts
Add multiple files to the ‘attachments’ field
Needing to add an entire second field for another file makes this functionality sort of un-useable. When on boarding a new project and collecting all the relevant samples, files, so forth - there are almost never only one or two files that need attaching.
Thank you for continuing to innovate! Forms, timelines, dashboards - all of these are the types of things that we are hoping for from Asana. When these three things reach maturity this platform will have really met its potential. So excited to hear about how these things are developing.