A design refresh on the way
Later this week or early next we’ll be pushing live an interface design refresh to bring Basecamp up to date with our modernized interface design direction as first seen with Highrise. We learned a lot while designing Highrise and we’re excited to bring those improvements over to Basecamp. We wanted to give everyone a heads up before rolling out the changes.

Subtle, but thoughtful
We spent a lot of time in the trenches tightening up the general UI structure, spacing, proportions, priority, text sizes, text colors, placement, emphasizing some things while de-emphasizing other things, replacing certain key links with buttons, turning other buttons back into links, reducing overall clutter during focused actions, and more. This modernization will continue as we tweak further and clean out some deeper, more difficult to reach cobwebs.

A few new features as well
There are also a bevy of subtle new features. For example, the messages list now shows the name of the last commenter under the title, you’ll see the exact time a message was posted (we only used to provide the date), we’ve added days of the week to most of the date stamps, etc. We’ve also knocked out a few error conditions by defaulting to “Untitled” if you forget to name a project or “List” if you forget to name a list. You’ll find these user-experience improvements peppered throughout the refreshed interface.

Comparisons
Below you’ll find some NEW | OLD (current) comparisons. Click on each one to open the image in actual size. They are big – about 1900 pixels wide and 250K – since we have two full-size screens side by side. The new design is on the left. The old is on the right.

Dashboard

Message list

A message with comments

To-do lists

New to-do list

Nice work.

Very glad to see the Centered Text style gone.

Great stuff – looks nicer and the time stamps are what I have been after! Would still like to see commenting on to dos and files enabled – keep up the good work.

Subtle but certainly an improvement. Glad to see you state the obvious like calling a list a list, if you know what I mean!

awww man…I kinda liked the big pink box around the overdue milestones. it was more in your face -get it done! now it seems too subtle.

Looks good – like many, we use several 37s products and it’s great to see them unifying.

Talking of which, I hope that becoming more like HR won’t mean that we lose the excellent colour profile options in BC, which allow us to make it match our corporate colours? In HR you are limited to one of ten fixed colour schemes… no where near as good as BC.

And I’ll second the “boo!” about late milestones being de-emphasised – we need more incentive to catch up, not less!

WhiteMonkey, we haven’t removed the color customization in Basecamp. That stays.

Thanks for that Jason, that’s good news. I know this isn’t the place to ask, but any chance of adding the BC one to HR? ;)

Looks good! I love it.

thank you for making sidebar text bigger!

it was more in your face -get it done! now it seems too subtle.

For the record, the big red block doesn’t seem to help people get things done. I’ve seen hundreds of dashboards and almost all of them have big red blocks that seem to get longer and longer and longer.

IMHO late doesn’t need to YELL late. People know the stuff is late. It’s in red, it’s at the top of the screen, it’s in red in the projects themselves, etc. There are plenty of indicators that things are late – not to mention the actual real deadlines that aren’t being met.

But we’re still tweaking the new UI and making adjustments so the red block may return. We’ll see. Thanks for the feedback.

What about something midway like a red chicklet saying “Late Milestone”.

I agree that the big red block is a bit loud but I think it is good to have some visual tickling as an incentive to get those milestones done. Something slightly disturbing that you don’t want to keep on your dashboard.

Late items are at the top of the Dashboard, it says “Late milestones” in red, there’s a red line below the header, and each item says the # of days late in red text. We think all that red is a sufficient nudge to let you know some things are late ;)

The incentive to get things done comes from the project, the client, the stakeholders, physical deadlines. Visual cues can spotlight stuff that’s late, but as far as we’ve seen they serve little real incentive to get things done. Anything visual is easy to ignore once you’ve trained yourself to ignore it.

I tend to agree with most of the posts about the ‘Red block’ we are an Agile Shop, and we use basecamp to manage all ‘implementations’ of our client work. It works really well for us to manage the throttle of developers – the more we see ‘red’ we tend to up the number of developers working in implementation instead of product development.

Just my 2 cents…

All good, especially adding time stamp to messages- thank you. Though will sorely miss the red “there will blood on the walls if you don’t get this done” block.

lol. Wow, I didn’t know project management was a bloody contact sport.

Yeah, comments for a to-do list would be considered gold to me.

Looks good. However, I think for some of my users, those little helpful hints (like the one right above the create a new to-do list) actually do help. I have several users who are not very computer or web savy and it would be a nice feature to be able to turn those helpful hints on and off, even better if I could do so for just certain users.

Keep up the good work!

At first, I was in the “need the red block” camp. But thinking about it a bit more, I see Jason’s point entirely. I’ve had stuff in my red box for weeks! :-) I think the point he makes is quite valid – it’s at the top, it’s red already, and being louder red doesn’t make you actually do it.

p.s. – kudos on the design refresh. Much needed and very nicely done.

I like being able to see the red block from across the room when walking around the office. It gives me license to nag right then. I don’t know if the red lettering will be as visible. I’m also sure my colleagues don’t need me to jump down their backs. However, I’m sure someone can whip up a greasemonkey script if some of us really miss the red box.

I am really REALLY glad the big red box is gone – it just didn’t look good! I love the new more streamlined look. Yay Basecamp!

I’m also glad to see the red box gone.

It was overpowering on the front. Sure you want to keep track of late milestones, and it’s right there. But sometimes a milestone being late is better than losing track of your priorities. The new look balances the need between tracking what is late, and seeing the big picture.

-g

Don’t cave, if these folks can’t get their work done a red block isn’t going to help. I think it more interrupted the layout than prompted anything (any more than seeing it in a list will). I’m glad to hear people won’t be seeing red on their coworkers monitors, I’m sure they are loved by those fellows (keep telling yourself that) (yeah, and you are funny too)

What kind of context for management would that be? I see something red on your monitor, therefore I know that it is the most important thing for you to be working on? Beep. ;)

I agree. Jason’s point’s well taken (and my first reaction was “need the red block”, too). Lookin’ good!

I really will miss the red block; hate not to jump on the bandwagon here; but it really does provide incentives to employes to remove the blocks.. because they show up on all of our monitors. Even if they reschedule it, it is definitely helping them assess priorities. It reminds us much more readily that we need to get these things done .. and not just think of them as just another “to do.” We have also seen the list grow longer, but it doesn’t mean we are not thinking about shortening it :) The regular to dos seem to be more easily ignored, so we are using the timelines more often for just this reason.

I too will be missin’ ol’ red. I never thought it garish or gawdy. Once upon a time the BC designers thought it was good too.