Most of us have gained familiarity with Asana Forms due to our dependence on the Asana project management tool. This PM tool works seamlessly with Asana forms to help teams gather inputs without wasting time.
Asana Forms bring in more interconnectivity and collaboration than ever. When working with teammates with varying perspectives, skills, and expertise, you can quickly improve the quality of your work with Asana.
If you’ve been searching around for a form tool that gives you more flexibility and clarity to objective work on your projects, Asana Forms is an excellent choice. Let’s look at Forms in Asana and how they can help you manage your project milestones effectively.
What are Asana Forms?
Forms is a form creation tool accessible by anyone with Asana Premium, Business, or Enterprise account subscriptions. By creating forms in Asana, it brings in more flexibility with functional features to receive inputs for your projects from both internal and external sources. It’s an essential tool for ensuring work moves smoothly without misunderstandings among the teammates.
Without a standardized streamlined way of getting input from your clients, you’d acquire them from meetings, emails, shared documents, and chats. Your work and information gathered may end up scattered, with missing critical details. Your team may end up confused and often failing to meet deadlines.
The Forms in Asana can help you eliminate this burden by creating a simple, streamlined process for clients to submit their requests to your team. With a standardized way of acquiring and sharing information among your team members, you can improve their productivity. You’ll ensure they receive what’s needed to handle requests and synthesize feedback from customers.
Asana projects offer a way to track every submitted form, allowing you to manage subsequent steps and facilitate effective and timely work completion.
When Should You Use Asana Forms?
If you’re already using the paid plans of the Asana PM tool, you’ll see that each project comes with a tab for “Forms.” Through this feature, you can create a web form connected to that particular project.
Asana Forms is useful for collecting requests from individuals outside your organization or team whenever you need specific input before commencing work. And the best part is that your form will be accessible to anyone even if they don’t have an Asana account. They can fill it up with requested data and submit their feedback without limitations.
That way, you can get the required information beforehand and track the progress of your projects, all under one roof. Forms in Asana are valuable for receiving input and requests, customer feedback, bug reports, and brainstorming ideas among team members.
Creating Forms in Asana PM Tool
What makes the Asana PM tool a favorite among many managers with non-complex projects is its usage simplicity. Everything is plain and in clear sight, so you won’t have to struggle to find a feature you want to use.
Every Asana project comes with the form creation option through the Forms tab. When you create a new form, Asana will automatically give it the name of your project. But it’s prudent to change it to something more reflective if planning to use numerous forms on the project. Plus, you’ll get the option to create descriptions or add some instructions for those filling in the form.
Every new form comes with two default fields for name and email, so you’ll never forget to include them after creating it. These fields make it easier for the user to leave their contact details behind after giving their feedback.
With the increasing flexibility of Asana Forms, these fields are no longer mandatory on forms, and you can delete them if you don’t need them. Every form submitted will give an email response to the user to let them know that the submission was successful.
If you want the user to receive updates every time the project changes, you can add them as followers under the tasks used to track project progress. However, they need to have an active Asana account for this to happen.
Asana Forms gives you the option to mark an input field as required. That allows you to make sure that the user responds to every information requested.
If you’re using custom fields, Asana Forms enables you to add them to your form as questions, and all submitted responses mapped directly to the respective fields. Anything else captured by the form will be visible under the task description to allow you to access everything in one place.
One excellent feature with Asana Forms is that it allows you to request users to submit attachments. There’s no limit to the type of attachments users can submit. Some of these include PDFs, images, word or text documents, and creative briefs.
You can also add a default attachment recipient, so every file attached is assigned automatically to them. After that, they can allocate it to another team member if required. Once your form is complete with the questions, Asana Forms will generate a link that you can share with teammates, send via emails, or put up on your website for access by anyone outside your team or company.
It doesn’t matter when or where the forms are accessed, every submitted response becomes a new task in your Asana project. To achieve this, head to Addons -> General, then click the Enable button. Follow the subsequent steps on the window that pops up.
Key Features of Forms in Asana
Asana Forms present excellent features to make the management of any project much more effortless. By utilizing these features, you’ll control how stakeholders submit required information via the forms.
Branching
This feature is accessible to those with Asana Business subscriptions only. It brings in the functionality of creating follow-up questions that relate to specific responses made to multiple-choice questions or dropdowns.
You can use the Branching feature by selecting either multi-select or dropdown questions from the list. Afterward, you’ll create the questions for which you want users to provide their responses. Next, you’ll add the branches by clicking the “Add a branch” button.
Forms customization
Asana Forms doesn’t provide detailed customization features, but the available ones are very functional. After creating your form, you can add multiple questions using the right sidebar. This feature is open to all subscriptions of Asana.
The customization feature allows you to create a default assignee to a form but is also limited to the Business subscribers.
Custom Field Mapping
Thie feature allows you to add custom fields to your forms and receive updates to the responses for questions connected to a project.
Also, custom field mapping allows you to populate the specific responses directly to the task components such as title fields, date fields, or any other custom-created field. For instance, if you have a question on your form about the project’s due date, you can map the response directly to the due date of your task.
Custom Branding
Asana Forms allows you to upload a logo through the Admin console if you’d like the responders to interact and feel your brand’s presence. After uploading it, head to the form name or description and click it to display the logo.
It also allows you to preview the form while creating it to get the same view that users will have when interacting with it.
Email notifications
Although email notifications are a must for any form creation tool, the way Asana Forms implemented it is impressive. Every time a form submission occurs, both the sender and the recipient will receive a custom email inbox.
Rules in Forms
Coordinating work rather than doing it is the biggest time project consumer for most project managers. The Rules in Asana forms allow you to create triggers and action combinations to organize your work in the right direction.
For instance, you can create a form Rule to add every form response to the team’s staffing project to get a clearer perspective on the roles of every team member.
What Are The Limitations of Asana Forms?
The fact that you can allow your project non-participants to share their inputs through Asana Forms is terrific. The list of things you can achieve with the forms is almost limitless. However, there are things that you can’t do with it.
- The customization and styling options are limited.
- Multi-step form layouts are not supported. Users fill the complete form in a single interface—that kind of limits user engagement.
- Task name formats are also limited.
- You cannot save forms as templates for later use. Every time you need a form, you have to start afresh.
Is it worth considering Asana Forms?
It all nails down to how fast you want to get work done. The tedious bit about managing projects is the coordination. Asana Forms offers many features to work with the Asana project management tool and automate most duties, such as getting feedback from stakeholders and creating tasks.
Plus, new features keep on popping up for every subscription level of Asana. Initially, the custom field mapping feature was only available to Business subscribers. But now, Premium users can access this feature together with multiple attachment submissions, form duplication via projects, and templates to make their work streamlined at the same cost.
It’s undoubtedly worth considering if you work with small teams that don’t handle complex projects and requirements. If you’re unsure whether Asana Forms will suit your needs, you can use the 30-day free trial offer to get a feel of what you’ll get when ready to pay.
