Getting up to speed: The latest on making Asana faster
As we build more advanced capabilities into Asana, and as more teams use Asana to track their work, the app has become slower to load. We know that many of you struggle with the speed of Asana on a daily basis, and for the past year it has been our number one priority to make Asana faster.
Simple improvements like caching haven’t been enough, so we’re investing in huge structural changes to make the app fast even as the product and our user base scales. This is an update on the progress we’ve made.
Switching between projects is faster
From looking at data and talking to customers, we know that it’s important for our users to be able to quickly navigate between projects in Asana, whether by clicking on the project name in the sidebar, from search, or from any other link to the project. Now, switching between projects is about 50% faster than it used to be. As our work continues, this will become even faster.
Switching between tasks is faster
Looking at the details of a task is one of the most common things for our users to do, so we’ve focused on making it faster to switch between tasks from within a project. We hope you notice speed improvements here — tasks now load about 100% faster than they used to.
Loading tasks from email notifications is faster
A common way that many people interact with Asana is to load up a single task from an email notification. We’ve shaved a few seconds off of the loading time from email, and are actively continuing to make this faster.
Faster API
As a result of our investment in a faster web app, accessing information from our API is also faster. Our server now provides data three times as fast as before, on average. This will make apps that integrate with Asana more responsive and interactive. Learn more about the faster API at our developers site.
What’s next?
We still have a lot of work to do, both in increasing the speed of the actions described above, as well as making other actions in Asana faster.
Our approach is to speed up the most frequent actions in Asana first. Switching between projects and tasks will keep getting faster over time, and we are now working on reducing the time it takes to load your My Tasks. Our biggest effort is in making it significantly faster to initially load Asana in a browser.
We will continue to have a large team dedicated to this effort until speed is no longer a problem. If you have feedback or suggestions on which interactions you’d most like us to make faster, we’d love to hear from you.
