Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

Relaxing : Travel to Vietnam visit to
http://www.vietnamtravelchannel.com
http://www.halongtrip.com
http://www.vietnamhorisontravel.com
http://vietlandexplore.com
http://www.vietnamluxurytravel.biz
http://www.vietnamperfecttravel.com

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

In response to Basecamp message response problems with clientèle noted above by kshock (initial post) and Rebecca_ST:

I see the confusion you are describing (though, as some state here, client prep beforehand does go a long way…and gives you more client-centered contact time). Still, in your honor, I propose the following mock-up as a fix for this message response quandary: http://elderforestpublishing.com/message_quandary.html

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

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

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

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

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

@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?

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

We had an incident this morning where someone sent a reply to a notification, not realising that about 30 people were subscribed to the message…

A while back I had suggested modifying the notification messages like this:

--- Reply ABOVE THIS LINE to post a comment to the project ---
--- (Your reply will also be received by: Jason F., Bob K., Jane R.) ---

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

There is no indication within the email of the distribution list for the message, or any indication of who will get the reply. The vast majority of my users are going to assume that everyone on the project is NOT getting their replies, which will not usually be the case. This was not the case prior to the new feature launch.

Users are now forwarding emails/comments to team members because they do not see who is receiving the communications – doubling the work.

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

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.

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

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.

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

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.

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

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…

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

If in an email it describes exactly who is going to be updated by an email-based comment and there were clear instructions on what will make up the body of the message it would be brilliant and I would definitely encourage its use.

Best way to rule out unnecessary content is search for a particular string in the reply i.e. # START COMMENT # [Comment body] # END COMMENT #

The do-not-reply address should be changed to something like comments@ or more specific to the particular message it relates to (thus reducing the chance of corruption)

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

There is no indication within the email of the distribution list for the message, or any indication of who will get the reply. The vast majority of my users are going to assume that everyone on the project is NOT getting their replies, which will not usually be the case.

This was not the case prior to the new feature launch.

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

login-to-reply or something else instead of do-not-reply@...?

when system sends emails to our clients, some of them do not even read them when they see; do-not-reply@...?

we sent welcome messages and account info to several of our clients via system, they called us and complained that they did not receive their passwords. (they deleted messages when they see do-not-reply@...? )

instead of do-not-reply@...? can we make it something more encouraging to login and use BasecampHQ ?

Thanks, Lewis

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

You should, yes. If you’re not, it’s likely a bug. If that’s the case, send an email to support so we can investigate.

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

So we are supposed to be getting email notifications of new comments posted by email? We aren’t receiving these, and we are subscribed to the message.

Topic: finer grained permissions

We are adding two projects per project too, one for contractor facing, and one for client facing. We have to download documents, or copy/paste back and forth between the projects. We basically don’t want contractors seeing all the material on the clients site, and and the other way around, but they do share some material.

Apart from a more indepth autorization system, one thing that would be nice for us would be to have the ability to copy documents and files from one project to another. So a contractor posts a file ready for the client, and we just send it to the client project instead of download, switch project, upload.

Another idea I had would be to have tabs with permissions per tab, so there would be a Contrator tab in a project with one company having access and Clent tab with a different company having access. Maybe this is just done on the message board. Right now I put private links in all the message boards linking client to contrator sites. Bit of a hack, but it’s faster than going back to the dashboard.

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

@smaddock: are you sure you’re subscribed to the messages in question? You won’t receive notifications of new comments unless you’re subscribed to the message being commented on.

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

Great feature, especially now without the project updates and the From: field being the poster.

Posting works great, but not getting email notifications of posts by email. Logged into the site a few times surprised to see posts that I was never notified of.

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

Nice feature

Topic: finer grained permissions

I was planning to post this request but had a hunch I was not the first one to encounter this problem.

I also deal with a number of freelancers, and would LOVE to be able to have a single project with all of them using it, and only allow them to see the things I have assigned to them.

For to-do’s this is pretty cut and dry but for messages and files, it gets a little trickier because I might need to be able to allow more than one person access or just say it’s public for all users on the project.

This would really be a huge plus for me if I could do this. As it is now, if I have two different programmers working on a project and I don’t want to share the project information between the two of them, I have to set up duplicate projects.

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

Just wanted to say that we love this feature. It has converted several of our clients that refused to use Basecamp into believers.

Given that many Basecamp users are the clients of web / interactive / design pros, they tend not to be as web savvy as your core users. The reply-by-email has them using the system now and even occasionally logging into it. However they DO NOT think twice about leaving their signatures in all their replies, so we are seeing a ton of noise in our message threads due to 300+ character signatures coming with the 50 character responses. Presently there is no way for us to clean those out of the thread.

Email Signature Noise Solution

Reasonably you can not open up the EDIT comment option to admins. This would destroy the trust built into Basecamp by the fact that it is a two way communication vehicle without a master controller that can edit everything at will. Delete is the only current option on message responses and that is perfect. To combat the noise, we need a filter:

• give admins of the basecamp install the ability to copy / paste email signatures from messages onto associated users
• once the admin has added the signature BC will then filter against (1 or more) signatures attached to each user
  • might also want to allow users to copy/paste their own signatures into the
• message threads get cleaned up retroactively based on signatures that are added, as the messages build from the database(s) whenever viewed

It would be a nice option for helping to clean up the message threads.

Topic: Anyone use BC for Web Design Projects?

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.

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

Jason and friends,

Thank you very much for implementing this feature. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you’re doing a good job of trying:-)

Duncan

Topic: Posting comments to a message by replying

Ok here’s our wrap up of the first week.

1. More clients/suppliers are using the system as a result. Even the “tough-to-crack” clients are at least replying to the messages.
2. Easier for our team to keep the flow of information happening without having to break stride
3. Our email client is becoming the conduit for BC/HR/BP information transfer

1. Missed a deadline due to client trying to attach a document to the reply and not being clear about it in her message.
2. Some clients getting bounced replies early in the week, feeling wary of the system.
3. The issue of the email signature “noise” within the message stream.

Very much in favour of the Pros since the Cons are only teething problems, education/convention issues or inconsequential.

I’d like to say thanks for introducing this to BC.
Easily the best update.
Ever.