I’ve used quite a few tools to track and manage employee’s projects. Many had minor problems that destroyed their usefulness. They were designed by people who knew what “web 2.0″ looked like, but didn’t understand the most critical features of UX (responsiveness & efficiency.)

This summer I switched from managing my project on vBulletin (great for searching, keeping records, and group communication, lacking everywhere else) to Asana. If you have under 30 employees, Asana is free. That is hard to pass up.

What makes Asana good? The simple stuff. You can add tasks like your writing them in your favorite text editor. No senseless and clunky additional steps in order to do something you’ll do thousands of times. Asana has a good search engine. That is critical, and one of the reasons we used vBulletin for as long as we did.

Each task allows tagging, file uploads, and conversations. That makes it a lot like a mini-thread in a forum.

Asana has its share of negatives. The biggest, I’ve seen a fair amount of down time. Its been enough to notice when it happens. The other is their mobile app. But, its been getting better.

I was going to post a screenshot. Then I realized almost the whole thing would be blurred out.