Two big Insights today:

1.- The 37signals guys DO LISTEN and then ACT

2.- MAKE USE of BCX INTENSIVELY FIRST then Talk about it.

“2.- MAKE USE of BCX INTENSIVELY FIRST then Talk about it.”

I did, and cancelled both my Basecamp Classic account, as well as cancelled by trial account.

Zoho Projects is an awesome alternative.

I’ve not invested much time in either Zoho or BCX but did you read the first linky from the search engines?

...I hope not, it was from 2008, and that’s how old Zoho looks…

I’ve been testing Trello, but for my next project I want to check out BCX. Good luck with your adventure Mr. Gary.

What customer innovations do you like?

@JF – I (and probably others) would love to hear some case studies about that.

@JF Definitely! Engineers job to give great tools (ie their product) and stand back and watch how people use it. Always have multiple ways to achieve things and users will achieve greatness. Just look at Photoshop as an example.

I really respect 37s for being so responsive to customers.

That said, our team was beta testing, and we’re going ahead with the move to BCX without time-tracking.

We used time tracking in BCC mainly for data on where our time was spent and how much we were getting done.

BCX helps us get a better idea of how much work is getting done on our projects through daily progress, morning emails and the catch up area on each project.

Time-tracking was not implemented well in BCC. Some of us were using third party apps to track time. Some of us were inputting time manually and inaccurately. It was always an extra task. A monkey on our backs. We understood the importance, but it got in the way of getting work done.

The amount of time someone spent on something is no indication of how much they got done or how thorough their work is. BCX helps us keep track of those important things much more easily.

I know everyone’s needs for time tracking are different (client billing, payroll, etc.) but I’m glad you guys had the guts to leave it out of BCX.

Customers are innovating behind your back. Turn around.

This is huge. As a designer/developer, it’s easy to get used to your own product, and only see it from one perspective.

I’ve always found it useful to shadow users and see how the things that I’ve created are used “in the wild.” There are definitely users who will be content to stay with a plain-vanilla approach, but some power users really figure out how to bend a piece of software to their will, and there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from that.

Real simple comment. We all know how easy basecamp can make communication between client and vendor. Issue is – with big companies there are a lot of junior level people on the client side that are ‘managing’ these projects. With basecamp – even they get it, and the process continues to flow. That is critical.

sorry – one more – feel free not to make it live but as the @37signals folk already know – http://www.zoho.com = #fail

Those boys need to buy more mac’s.

Time tracking: Challenge:

“Track time of people that do not want track time”

Our programmers and designers dislike administrative task like time registration yet it is our sales unit that pays their salary.

Old basecamp is simple and perfect for us: Time per to do, our operating unit of measure.

Accountability to our customers: Our invoices specify hours per to do. Performance monitoring to ourselves: How long took a to do.

We missed target in old basecamp but had workaround in adding word planning to description.We also use easy-insight for reporting.

“Collaboration and communication while staying in control”

I’m happy to see this admission of your time tracking blind spot, but I wonder if there are some others you should consider. Do you work with many outside clients? Based on the way projects are listed in new Basecamp, I would assume no. If all your projects are internal, then alphabetical listing might make sense and be easy to use. But I have many outside clients and multiple projects with each. Workflow is slowed when projects aren’t listed by client. I would also assume that you don’t work on projects where you share information with clients and third party consultants. The lack of privacy items and categorization would suggest this. There are many times when I need to share information with my internal team that’s for our eyes only, and there are times when my consultant team and I are sharing files that aren’t ready for the client to see. Privacy allows us good simple control of those situations. I saw a discussion thread where you suggested that looping someone in is a comperable work around, but I think you may not know how people are using privacy, because looping someone in is not the same. Using it to control privacy is a far more complicated and cumbersome method. It’s a nice new feature, but not a replacement. And while working with outside consultants, the difficulty is usually getting them to adopt Basecamp in the first place. If its harder for them to use, the likelihood of Basecamp being our primary management tool is diminished. The lack of categories for discussions and files does just that. A project with hundreds of files and no structure is basically a big bucket to throw things. Without order, it’s near impossible to use quickly and efficiently. I found this out just five minutes after I transferred a project from Classic. The lack of file organization made the project instantly unmanageable and I had to switch it back right away. Although less critical, no categories for discussions also slows down workflow.

The issues above I consider deal killers, but there are some small annoyances. The inability to reorganize to do lists is frustrating. I build my lists based on project phases. Phase priorities regularly change and I need to move the lists around so the most important or most current lists are at the top. But I can’t do that in the new version. I’m stuck with the order the list were created. Again, a hurdle to clear that slows down workflow. I like how project informs handled in Classic. I use that as a place to put general project info and answers to most often asked questions. More importantly, it allows active hyperlinks. This is a killer feature that needs to find its way into the new Basecamp. All of my projects have links to Google docs, Pinterst boards, and other web pages. Having those links available right at the top of the project page has been fantastic. I also like how projects can be put on hold in Classic. I use this all the time. My clients are constantly deactivating and activating their projects. Being able to store them as on hold keeps them visible, tet out of the way. This would be nice to have in the the new version. This may be a glitch that just started, but I cannot access the new Basecamp on my iPad. That’s a serious problem. My whole team is out of the office a great deal and we rely on our iPads to connect to our 37 Signals suite of apps. I would like to do more serious testing with the new version, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to export anything. If I transfer a project then decide after the 90 day trial that I can’t use the new version, what happens to that data? Is it deleted or trapped? Also no API for third part apps makes a full transfer from Classic very difficult. Please get that sorted out as soon as you can.

Basecamp has been invaluable to my company and we would love to move to the new version, but some major kinks need to get worked out before we can even do a serious test. Thanks,

As students of Clayton M. Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, I’m sure you are aware of the potential pitfalls of looking to customers to guide strategy.

For Insight No.2:

Joel Spolsky’s anecdote about Microsoft Excel comes to mind.

Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff.

...

Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.

We were really interested in how you might update such a widely used platform and your approach to updating the interface and features, especially since you guys are quite out spoken on the topic of web development.

We’re not very happy with the update at all. The simplicity has been lost and replaced with pretty design elements. As a web design company, that feels like a surprising comment. The removal of Writeboard versioning is a big blow. As is the user management for projects. I’m really surprised at how you guys removed features. And, no mobile version?

We’re going to push on with the old Basecamp.

BTW, we use Harvest for time-tracking and invoices and it has been amazing. It’s now an essential tool for our business.

Thanks.

This is very VERY reassuring. Thanks for listening JF. Looking forward to the results of your R&D.

Yes, I think there are many things that should be in “Basecamp 2”. Somehow this new basecamp doesn’t seem like “Basecamp 2” but more of a “light version” of what the new basecamp should be.

The timeline daily progress and the drag-and-drop functionality for uploading files are awesome, but leaving behind stuff like time-tracking was a bad choice and 37signals noticed that, so I believe time-tracking will back soon.

The overall design looks good though working with it requires a bit of practice if you are used to the old basecamp. There’s stuff that could be simpler and content based, and should probably follow more the actual web standards, on a UX point of view (almost couldn’t find the to-do lists…) and there’s also stuff that’s way to simple and sometimes all gets mixed together and there is no way to differentiate (maybe using lines to separate section as well as icons instead of all text?) different section on the page.

Previewing messages in discussions seems to be lost, as well as the ability to HTML markup in messages. That is strange…

Well, these are probably things that you guys already have seen. Just my 2cent.