I’ve been using BC for over a year now, and while it has helped us internally organize files and project info, I’m finding it difficult to make BC work well for our web design projects when it comes to presenting clients with designs, getting their feedback, uploading revisions and getting approval on design choices.

After a year of use, we have found that generally our clients find BC very confusing and difficult to use. They’re never sure where to look to find a file or how to give feedback or approve a design. I’ve tried doing this via Messages and attached files, but, the Messages interface isn’t very intuitive in the way Comments are hidden from view but the original message is in full view. Unless you notice that “3 comments” text link, you don’t realize a whole conversation may be going on after the initial message. As a result, every single client always starts a new message for every bit of feedback, which becomes a mess eventually and impossible to make any sense of it all.

FIles all get clumped together by date or category only, there’s no real versioning tools that help us and clients keep track of which is the latest design or which of the submitted designs was approved out of the group.

So, we are finding that Basecamp is not meeting the needs of a web design shop who needs to interact with clients and present designs and versions of designs for approval. If anyone has found a way to make it work for this kind of workflow, I’d love to learn the details of how. Or, if there’s a solution similar to Basecamp that is more appropriate for design shops, please let me know.

Thanks!

Tom

As a rule of thumb, basecamp works well with people who you are paying and piecemeal with people that are your clients. You need to adjust to each client, some will use and some wont. Dont fuss, adapt.

Use it with clients to let them see the todo lists and milestones. Definitely use it to deliver files as it gets through all the firewalls (we have seen) and is a lot more secure than email that can be transferred to anyone. Ease them in gently.

As for your own people, I persuade as follows, if you dont enter times into Basecamp, you dont get paid. This gets their attention for all the other stuff.

Garry Robinson
Editor http://vb123.com

kshock,

I just wrote a post about Elance’s great Private Message Board system.

http://forum.37signals.com/basecamp/forums/3/topics/5476

They really have the interface planned well. I have never had an Elance client who failed to “get” how to use it.

Someone outside Elance, whether 37signals or someone else, needs to create a solution just like it. (I’ll get involved in that project if someone wants to partner up!)

John
summer9consulting@gmail.com

Based on our most recent Basecamp customer survey, the majority of people who use Basecamp use it for web design projects. Basecamp was originally built to manage web design projects.

So, we are finding that Basecamp is not meeting the needs of a web design shop who needs to interact with clients and present designs and versions of designs for approval.

Post a message, attach a design, allow people to comment. That’s how thousands of people successfully use Basecamp to manage web projects.

I agree with Jason. We are a web agency with 100+ clients using Basecamp is some capaacity and doing so quite sucessfully. We’ve achieved this in part because we do extensive walkthrough’s on how to use Basecamp with our clients at our initial kick-off meetings. The training has been key to getting clients to buy in to the system (and really have fun using it. We’ve had a handful that are looking into Basecamp for their own businesses). Every 10 clients or so we have one that just doesn’t like it (typically tech-illiterate clients) so we accomodate for them.

In terms of the issue related to message comments, I would recommending setting your client’s accounts to list view on the computer you train them on and then teaching them how to do so as most likely they will log in to Basecamp of various computers and this option is cached, not saved per account. List view makes it much easier to see the latest messages and comments.

kshok, as a BC user myself with 82 active client projects, I’m baffled by you finding it difficult to do the process you explain in your first paragraph. That’s exactly what we do with clients in a single message, and have done hundreds of times successfully.

We have worked with 105 different clients and aside from the initial logging in to BC, we’ve had no client’s complain about. Many do tell us how much they like it.

We are also a web design firm, and we’ve been using Basecamp for only a few months. We have recently introduced it to some selected clients, and we are also facing the very same problems that the original poster mentioned. Namely:

• Clients aren’t sure where best to go to see the latest changes. They go to FILES and while it’s easy for us to understand, they get confused on what is the latest, esp. when there are multiple mockups of multiple screens. Perhaps if we can create “folders” or something that might help.

• Clients – even when trained – don’t fully GET how to use the Messages. The “ADD A NEW MESSAGE” button on the right is so prevalent that that is what they end up doing to reply to a previous message, instead of going into the message in question and posting a “comment”. So we are running into these giant threads of messages, some are comments burried in these threads, and it ultimately makes no sense.

• The WRITEBOARD is a great concept, but the execution is not Client-friendly. Our clients are not having a good time using the “textile” markup. If there was some kind of a toolbar or WYSIWYG interface that would be ideal. Everyone is used to Word!

It was hard enough to get them to use a system like Basecamp to manage the day to day affairs and to-do’s, don’t ask them to learn something new! I know, it’s crazy! But Clients are lazy. For our part, our company, who are all web-savvy, absolutely love Basecamp.

We just wish BC’s approach was more client-friendly.

I own a WebDesign and Software Development firm out of Seattle, WA -I have the opposite experience: we send out the ‘new account’ email w/ some brief comments but our clients mostly teach themselves how to use BaseCamp and we’ve had no problem getting people to jump on the bandwagon. I love BaseCamp and don’t know how we survived before we had it…

I have the same experience as fdizzle. The “new account” email that gets sent out might (sometimes doesn’t) include some info about how to use BC. Also, the day of, or right before, project kickoff, I post a message to everyone involved in the project and I include one short paragraph aimed at the client explaining (in general terms) how to use the system and why it’s better than email. I’ve only had one client in my 1+ year of using Basecamp who has had an issue with it and that’s because she doesn’t know much more than Outlook and Word. In my opinion, it boils down to client education.

If anyone wants more control over their image posting, versioning, commenting, display options and image markup you can check out this… http://www.vyoopoint.com
We’ve been Basecamp users for a few years now and are building it to supplement BC in the area of image posting (and video too). It’s not quite ready for prime time but wanted something that was super clean and efficient for posting images, storyboards, jpeg and swf for client review and markup. Pop in your email address and we’ll let you know as soon as it is ready for trying out.

We are also a web development company and we use BC with all of our clients. I have a pre-designed “Welcome letter” that I paste into the comments box at the bottom of the welcome email, briefly explaining how to us each tab. We certainly have clients that keep emailing us instead of using BC, but we copy their emails into BC until they get the hint. We have found it so much easier to keep the whole team up to date that way, otherwise emails get lost in inboxes or sent to the wrong person.

We’ve also started alerting some “problem clients” up front that if an email is sent directly to a team member instead of through BC it may not be received or read in a timely manner. That usually convinces them to use it.

@kshock and rebecca:

I feel where you’re coming from, but I don’t think there’s any way to successfully fix most of these problems. First, because Basecamp is already an incredibly simple system. The ways in which people will be confused by the system are largely not predictable. I’m sure there’s a few tweaks here and there that could help, but what we’re really talking about are novice users.

For instance, putting a WYSIWYG editor would clearly be helpful for people are familiar with Word. The problem is that WYSIWYG editors are big and complex and aren’t very compatible with Textile (that I know of). This is a problem because Textile is much faster than a visual editor if you know how to use it, so it doesn’t make sense to cannibalize 90% of users productivity to serve a small minority that aren’t the target market anyway.

I think Garry pretty much hit the nail on the head. Some people will get it some people won’t. The value of Basecamp is to your team. Transcribe word documents to writeboards yourself if necessary. In a perfect world all clients would buy in to Basecamp, but since when do all clients buy in to anything?

We’re a small web development company based in the UK and have/are reviewing several options at the moment including Basecamp for our simple PM needs. I was therefore initially really pleased to come across this thread which clearly posed the question that I wanted answered but I’m slightly concerned that a number have struggled to get the best out of it. This is most odd given Jason’s Frieds statement of Mar 22 which said ‘Based on our most recent Basecamp customer survey, the majority of people who use Basecamp use it for web design projects. Basecamp was originally built to manage web design projects.’

Given this clear bias towards the web design industry, you would think that the ‘getting started’ process would be much more aligned towards our needs rather than the generic approach it seems to take. Please don’t misunderstand me, I know that the generic approach means BC is open to a much wider audience but I think this is a huge opportunity missed if indeed we are the main target audience.

Two initial thoughts. 1. If it was really designed for web designers, surely this thread shows you that some part of your target audience isn’t getting the best out of the product giving BC the opportunity to improve what is apparently an already excellent product. I do have quite a few ideas here but it would make this initial thread way too long.
2. What about the end customers – those of us who have lots of small web projects on the go at once probably don’t have the time to carry out ‘extensive walkthroughs’ for these people as we haven’t built this into our project cost. Again, this tells us that there are improvements that can be made to the client facing side of BC if nothing else. Maybe, the client interface could be changed to accomodate both the technically challenged and those business users who are more concerned about managing their business than they are having to learn a new product in order to get a website built !

To help us get started quickly, can those experienced BC users share with us their must do top 10 tips. Dare I say it, can you share with us your getting started or welcome letters to the end customer and any obvious web design related ‘to do’ lists. I know you have probably worked hard to get these in place but I’m sure your efforts would be most appreciated. I for one would be willing to pay someone if it meant that I could hit the ground running.

Note to Jason Liebe: Jason you seem to have come up with the golden nugget of a single message that allows your customers to get started very quickly. Any chance you could share tis with us ;-)

Neil

Neil, everyone.

If you want to give your clients a simple and intuitive way to work with you on your design projects via Basecamp, then please take a look at ProofHQ’s integration with Basecamp. Our aim is to give Basecamp users and their clients a better way of collaboratively reviewing and approving design and creative work.

Jason blogged about the integration here. http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/proofhq-and-bas.html

You can see more about the ProofHQ Basecamp integration here. http://www.proofhq.com/html/basecamp.html

If you have any questions, please contact me directly via our website.

Mat