What is the use case for messages?

English Forum Use Cases
1

I’m not seeing the use case for the messages feature. As an content object in themselves - there is nothing that they can do that tasks can not.

Additionally there are limitation which cause a lot of problems - you can essentially make a project “not deletable” if a large bulk of information has been embedded in the messages tab.

I wouldn’t mind it if messages were promotable to be tasks. Then I could start an ideas as a conversation then migrate it to a task.

Nevertheless, I can only really see the messages feature being useful in terms of meta conversation around the asana configuration of a project board. Maybe sending a password to a particular person or project members could be a good use case.

I’m still keen to understand how people use the feature, if I’m missing something?

2

You are not missing anything, messages are basically a sub-version of tasks not adding any additional feature.

My personal opinion: they were created as a way to be able to say that “Asana can replace a communication tool”, but then the product team stopped in their track and never improved them. I can even go as far as betting Messages will disappear. We have seen them being more and more hidden in the interface. Again, that’s my personal opinion, I don’t work for Asana.

3

Some use cases vs tasks that haven’t been mentioned here yet:

  1. Discuss something that doesn’t relate to a project and with an arbitrary set of people
  2. Discuss anything project-wide and distinguish from individual project tasks
  3. Discuss something that relates to a team
  4. Discuss something that relates to multiple projects and/or teams (message thread appears in each project’s/team’s Messages tab)
  5. Project Statuses are implemented with the same Messages facility (so I don’t see how it will go away)

Thanks,

Larry

3 Likes
4

Yes but creating a one-off message is not getting a lot of love these days, that’s why I implied it might go away, maybe just to come back as a chat?

5

At issue is that using the tasks feature for communication is an order of magnitude better then communication that you get in other platforms like Slack. Conversation that is - actionable, own-able, summarise-able, workflow-able, close-able etc…

The messaging function is a pain because you need to make policy “Don’t use the message function, except for in these special cases”. That needs a fair bit of communication and energy to make work without people saying “hay I’ll just pop this or that in a message”. Assana just becomes like another Slack very quickly - with all the problems that entail.

6

The main problem with Slack still is that people are not trained on how to use it properly. But when you have Asana and Slack, you still need to make it super clear when to use Asana and when to use Slack.

7

I absolutely agree. I love the feature. It’s so much better than messages outside Asana. I can still talk to the project collaborator and keep all this in the same tool. Too many questions are posted in the task thread, not related to the task and should be channelled via Messages.
Most importantly, it’s excellent for collaborations outside the org.

1 Like