What needs improvement with Asana?

More features can be added.

Asana should provide the ability to have read-only users. Sometimes, I need to collaborate with people external to my organization, and I would love to invite them to my Asana board and assign tasks to them. Sometimes, these are short collaborations. I work in marketing, and sometimes I work with agencies. I would love to do project management on my side, which would be way easier. It's difficult to have short-term collaborations with external users because the operations team owns the final licenses, and I work for marketing.

It would be great if Asana could create a library for each project within the interface. For example, if you are working on ten projects and need to make daily changes to all of them, having a separate library for each project would be helpful.

The mobile application of Asana has to be improved a lot because no one wants to do a complete project management task on mobile. While on my mobile phone, I would like to get an update quickly or a short task notification so that I don't forget anything, for which the mobile interface is very clumsy. I don't have anything related to the additional features required in the solution on top of my mind because my company hasn't even used 50 percent of the tool's feature set. We have customized the tool based on our processes. We are using whatever we need in the tool, so I don't have any suggestions for adding features to Asana.

Some customizations and functions are still not available, however, so far, they haven't been a deal killer. Asana appears to be open to suggestions, and as they are continually making improvements, these might be implemented in the future. It takes some time to get used to and is initially difficult to navigate Asana. It gets much better as you get to know about Asana. Since you can’t set up an advanced search to distinguish between tasks, folders, and projects, I also have trouble with the search feature.

The user interface is so busy. It took me quite some time to understand how to navigate my way around the product. The application itself is busy. There’s so much information on it. When we log in to Asana, we have so many icons, and it is difficult to understand how to find things. The user interface is not easily accessible. The product must reduce the information on the interface. The solution has more color and fewer applications.

The documentation could be enhanced by incorporating more visually informative videos that demonstrate how to accomplish specific tasks. While Asana's community support is valuable for answering questions, finding precise answers often requires sifting through multiple posts. Having concise and explanatory videos would greatly improve the user experience. When searching on platforms like Google, there are many individuals sharing their approaches to using Asana. However, the information provided is often not directly applicable to one's specific needs. Therefore, it would be advantageous to have comprehensive video tutorials that address common user queries. This would provide a more efficient and intuitive way of accessing information, especially when it comes to learning how to navigate and utilize Asana's features effectively. Asana offers a variety of view formats that provide different levels of visibility. These include board view, list view, timeline view, and dependency view. For a single project, you can explore multiple views depending on your objectives. If you're working on a long-term project, you may prefer the timeline view to track your progress and have a macro-level overview of where you stand. On the other hand, for more granular tasks, the board view can be helpful in monitoring the progress and visualizing how things are advancing. The choice of view is not merely a feature selection but rather a decision based on the visibility it offers for your specific needs.

Improvement-wise, I would like more options for changing notification settings. Currently, there are only a few available options, but it would be helpful to have more control over the notifications received. For example, if you are on a project, you can receive every notification related to it, even if the task isn't yours. It would be interesting if Asana could integrate with email platforms like Outlook and on, Gmail, and Google Calendar. This way, when a project has a due date, it could automatically appear on people's calendars.

The solution can be difficult for new users to use because of the interface.

It would be beneficial if Asana had a predecessor feature that automatically adjusts all subsequent dates when changes are made to a timeline. For example, if I assign a designer four hours for one task and two days for another, and the completion of a task takes longer than anticipated, it would be convenient if updating one date could prompt the adjustment of all other relevant dates. Essentially, this feature would streamline the process and eliminate the need for manual adjustments.

If you have been using a tool like Jira for many years, it make time some time to get used to the minimalist layout in Asana. Once you get used to it, you may find it easier and faster to use than Jira.

Some updates are outdated, and their functionalities can affect the end outcomes. When a task is deleted before submission, it is not easier to locate it. The software just requires regular updates, and everything will be okay. I did not experience many performance challenges as we are able to implement projects and submit them to our clients on time. It is simple and more flexible to work with it from anywhere and achieve the set targets. I appreciate the vendor team for coming up with the basic solutions for handling any given task and project using Asana.

We have not used Asana on our private server. We have only been using the cloud solution. We need an on premise solution for government agencies. This would be an improvement if this was possible.

One of the main things I've been wishing for is an ID, a short ID, just like Jira. That is another tool that I used before. It has an ID for every task in Asana. So it's a short way to know what task are you writing your things on, and it's easier to control your activities. In Asana, there's no way to add a custom date field. That's another thing. Both of those functionalities I'm wishing for, or I'm hoping for in the short term. Occasionally, Asana does go down.

I would like to add Asana to other email platforms. If you use Outlook, you can get an email. And since Asana is integrated into Outlook, you can connect this email to Asana, however, this is not so in other mail applications. We'd like the capability to be able to set up weekly reminders. Right now, in order to do this, we need to change the date every time.

I'm not an expert on Asana. I'm only a user, and it does exactly what we want it to do. We are really happy with the software, so currently, there's no area for improvement. On the development side for technical project management, Asana is missing features. We only use it for discussing tasks and strategies, and we use it for customer to-do lists. It doesn't have the source code integration that Jira and Jira Service Desk both have. We have Jira deployed on-premises for our development department. Our technical project management is on Jira, while our general project management is on Asana.

The world is moving to a lot of video-type communication and having a quick way to do video inside the platform or communicate via video from one person to another could be very handy. In a couple of other platforms, I have looked for a way to communicate with the team with a short 30-second video that I can just click on, record, send, and be done with it. I don't think it needs additional features as much as having a way to onboard the team and having a better way to get everybody accustomed to using it. That's what we need to figure out. I don't know if that's anything that Asana can do as much as it is just figuring out how to build an implementation plan for the product on our end.

Auto-shift is an essential feature for planning, but it's currently not there. It should have this feature so that when you move a task that depends on another task, the dates should be auto-shifted. For example, you have two tasks dependent on each other. When the parent task is moved or delayed, the child task should also be delayed, and the date should be shifted. When we have a very long timeline, it's very complex to go task by task and shift the dates on the task. Auto-shift is a fantastic and basic feature of project management, and having such a feature in Asana would make our lives much easier. If Asana added this feature, it would complete the suit and close the project management cycle because currently, there is a gap.

Nothing is missing in terms of features at the moment. You need to have a plan going in or it might be hard to use. You need to have an action plan, otherwise, it won't be as effective.

We tried, but we haven't been successful with it. If people don't have the training, it is not easy to use. You need to make sure that the people are trained to use the system. They can provide more resources in the form of webcasts and videos that people can use to train themselves and understand how to use it.

For large teams, scalability should be improved.

You have to understand some basic functions on how to do tasks. For example, I didn't use any help file or helping tool to try to understand better what it could do. It took me, let's say a few trials to find how out how to import somebody on the Cloud. There just needs to be a bit more direction on how to use it at the outset.

There could be some improvements in terms of how projects or day-to-day work is organized. One of the challenges when it comes to rolling out to an enterprise is the way the projects are organized. It has a kind of setup where you have different projects and tasks, but it is not as organized as Smartsheet when it comes to organizing projects or different teams. It can get really cluttered really fast. JIRA has another suite to submit the support tickets. It would be good if Asana could branch out to incorporate some kind of workflow. It is great for collaboration and recording work, but there isn't any workflow. It would be useful if they can map out a workflow of who approves what. This is kind of a big ask, and it is not geared towards that.

While having custom templates is a big benefit, I see a lot of opportunities for improvement in Asana's execution of the concept. A user should be able to identify an assignee for specific tasks or task types while applying the template, or at a minimum, allow for a default assignee. As it is, the template gets created with the just task dates driven by the project start and end dates inputted by the user. In my current situation, I'm assigning myself to many tasks, so I have to do that manually every time. Even if I eventually start adding other people to assign tasks, there won't be more than a handful to do. However, those few people will have multiple tasks. It would be nice to be able to select those individuals during the setup rather than having to do so manually once the project has been created.

* The inbox feature can be a little overwhelming if you are working with Asana just from its project boards and only checking it periodically. It would be great if it auto-cleared once a project/task is marked complete. * Email notifications can get excessive. You have complete control over them but initially, they can be annoying until you set the frequency you want them. It would be better if this was set during the sign-up process. * Notes, discussions, and attachments in subtasks sometimes go unnoticed if working from the main project board.

This solution has a learning curve, where it is initially difficult to use.