Asana is complex. Too complex.<p>Twice now, I've witnessed a roomful of highly skilled, intelligent people scratching their heads and shouting over each other trying to accomplish simple tasks with Asana. There's an excess of terminology, an even bigger excess of features, and a serious mental mismatch between "the Asana way" and just organizing some information within a team.<p>On the other hand, <a href="https://trello.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trello.com/</a> is an absolute delight.<p>Hell, the article even goes on to explain how to shoehorn a Kanban board in to Asana. Meanwhile, Trello essentially <i>is</i> a Kanban board.
I've used Asana and Atlassian's jira. Jira is far and away easier to use and has much better control. It's always clear to me which issues I need to work on first and which versions of the product they'll impact.
We also use Asana and Kanban. However we have a simplified use in Asana. I've found that you have too many projects and places where to look.<p>We have one project called Kanban board, with all the features for web, iPhone and Android app (8 people use it). This board has several headers:<p>* To Production
-> All tasks that are ready to be deployed<p>* To Test - Second test (5)
-> All tasks that have to be tested a second time<p>* To Test - First test (15)
-> All tasks that need to be tested<p>* Development - Finished (10)
-> All tasks that have been comitted, but haven't been deployed to the alpha sever/app.<p>* Development - Working (7)
-> All tasks that developers/designers are working on.<p>* Pending - Bugs
-> All tasks that need to be fixed.<p>* Pending - Analysis
-> All tasks that need to be analyzed (improve description, break them into subtasks)<p>* Pending - New (20)
-> All tasks that need to be done<p>* Backlog
-> All future tasks / features / suggestions<p>We use projects to indicate if the task is for web, iPhone or Android; and tags if it's urgent.<p>There can not be more tasks that the number between parenthesis. If there are 12 in Finished for example, we know we have to deploy to the alpha server/app.
I don't think I would say asana is complex as far as usability. The interface and shortcuts are all pretty intuitive in my opinion. I do think though that asana's lack of opinion or convention and freedom of how to structure the tasks is what some people may feel is "complex".<p>It seems like anything that requires a bit of thought or self controlled structure people seem to tag as complexity. In a cyber world where usability and simplicity is defined by a users lack of need to think much as they are using the app, this totally makes sense. But as a user of asana myself, I have found once you get past that "feeling of complexity" - which is just a matter of deciding your own conventions, then asana is a beautifully simple collaborative tool. Flexibility is not complexity, although it may feel like it is because it requires more effort on our own part to establish the workflow.