Asana is complex. Too complex. 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. On the other hand, https://trello.com/ is…
> Asana is complex. Too complex... 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. As a user of Asana, this is strange for me to read. What did they argue over? Asana has projects, and you put tasks within the projects. If you want you can use sub-headings to separate things within a project. How is that c…
People argued over whether or not a particular sub-project should be a project or a section. People argued over when to use sections vs when to use tags. People were uncomfortable creating "tasks" for things that don't have a singular notion of "done". People argued over when to use subtasks vs top level tasks. It was just silly.
Ignoring my complaints about Asana's UI/UX, simply choosing more abstract words, such as "boards" and "cards" alleviates a great deal of cognitive dissonance when creating organizational systems for new teams and domains to be organized.
Joel wrote a great article about how this sort of thinking leads to a very different product design, and Trello's approach specifically: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html