Happy they're diving into boards. Just tried it out and it's pretty barebones. But that's okay, it'll grow.

The big issue though is Asana still has a big design & usability problem, which is especially pronounced in comparison with their new competitor Trello.

Visually, Asana has exceedingly low contrast between items and favors shades of very light grey, which is only made worse with small fonts and icons, and non-hidpi displays. Greyscale UIs are okay if color is used sparingly on key actions, but even the colors don't make much sense - yellow upgrade button, red/orange project adder (which, unlike in the blog post, doesn't even present me with the option to add boards), pink (in my case) user presence circle, blue dot for a task mark. It's all kind of a jumble when starting out, and the most straightforward action (add a task) is entirely invisible until mousing over.

The info hierarchy is also totally puzzling in Asana - what is an entirely different project(? not sure the lingo) versus a within-project 'project' versus todos and other stuff in there. They're all jumbled together, unlabeled, in both top nav and user presence menu, and it makes me think twice before doing something like inviting a collaborator (because I don't know what view I'm inviting them to). Plus the tasks/inbox/dashboard tabs then have sub tabs in them that don't make much sense as to why they're there. And view changes are slow. It looks like an attempt at simplicity that misses the mark on which things to simplify.

Meanwhile Trello delineates the various hierarchies (boards, lists, cards) very well. Trello has clear distinction between cross-board stuff situated in the top nav (boards, search, trello logo, user presence), followed by within-board contents in the second to top nav (board name, star, privacy, and link for menu), followed by lists and cards. Trello also has a board index where you can see all your boards and which ones are part of which organizations.

To charitably interpret this, I'd say that Trello is designed to support many boards for different things, whereas Asana's interface is built around a single main project(?), and doesn't scale well to many unrelated projects. Trello has a low barrier to entry but lacks detailed collaborative project management tools out of the box, and focuses on an ecosystem of powerups, where Asana has more features but you're stuck with all of them and has high initial cognitive load.

This means Trello is a good tool for casual usage, and can scale to some degree of complex projects. Asana looks like it is made for complex projects run in a particular way with lots of information density, but introduces too many concepts and lays them out too haphazardly to be useful for casual projects or casual usage. I think that introduces a big friction point for adoption across teams, as it doesn't do service to users that aren't interacting with the tool super frequently. I guess another way to put it is Asana feels enterprise-y in execution. Meanwhile Trello feels like a true consumer product, and like Slack, is part of a breed of consumer-to-enterprise plays that are nailing it by starting simple.

I really like that Asana is acknowledging in this post that there are many different processes users adopt to tackle projects, as overly opinionated designs in the productivity space will limit addressable market significantly. Adding more views & workflows that all are tied to your data is great. Wish the UI/UX were a lot better.