SIGNAL VS. NOISE

Workshop Announcement: The Building of Basecamp

Announcing the "The Building of Basecamp" workshop. Go behind the scenes and learn what it takes to launch a new web-based application &mdash from an idea on a napkin to launch and beyond. June 25, 2004. Chicago, IL. $395/person (with discounts starting at 2 people). Send 3 people and get a free 1-year Basic Basecamp subscription ($228 value). Don't miss this one-day-only event (only 40 spots available). We hope to see you there.

An exercise in clarity: RSS

Explain RSS in 10 words or less to someone who reads news online (and a possibly few blogs although they may not necessarily know them as "blogs"), but doesn't know what a newsreader or aggregator is.

Conceptual Blog-Format Brainstorm

Isn't it odd that the blog entry is always the focus even when the conversation about the entry (the comments) is often where the real value is? An entry could have 100 cogent comments, yet that wealth of commentary is hidden behind a little "Comments (100)" link. The original entry remains the star for eternity. It never steps out of the way and lets the commentary take the stage.

The only semi-exception I've seen is Jason Kottke's Further afield concept where he posts his favorite personal comments that he's left on other sites on his own blog as free-standing entries. It's still not quite what I have in mind, but at least it takes content (a comment) that's often secondary and makes it primary. Update: Simplebits SimpleQuiz Conclusions are good examples of this as well.

It would be interesting to see a blog that shifts the focus onto the comments after a certain number have been posted, or when the editor (the blog owner) decides that the comments are adding more value than the original post. Or, after a certain number or days (or comments or a natural end to the conversation) a summary of the original post and positions taken in the comments could replace the original entry.

Finding icons

Does anyone know of an online resource that displays all the different application and document icons (at 16x16 and 32x32) for a variety of popular programs (Microsoft's, Adobe's, Macromedia's, etc)? For example, I'd like to be able to find out what a Macromedia Flash icon on XP looks like. Or a MS Excel document icon on OS X. Or a generic document icon on XP, etc.

I realize icons seem to be tweaked for each major release, but since there are billions of documents in existence you'd think there'd be some sort of database or listing of current icons similar to semi-standardized universal symbols.

Giving me a way out

Applications are usually kind enough to offer you a choice about whether to embark on a major upgrade or conversion, but rarely do you have the information available to make an informed choice. Apple's iPhoto is different. With the 4.0.1 upgrade, you not only get the choice beforehand, but also a way out after the important information is available—how long will this take.

More applications should follow Apple's lead.

Happy Cog Studios Turns 3.0

Jeffrey Zeldman and company's Happy Cog Studios just turned 3.0. And, as you'd expect, it validates XHTML 1.0 (fussy), CSS2, 508. Much respect to those who practice what they preach. Good job guys and continued success.

Google Features

David Pogue asked Google's executives and staff for their favorite Google tips and tricks. (NY Times)

Turns out that at Google, you can track FedEx or UPS packages, type in an equation ("32+2345*3-234=") and click Search to see the answer, convert units-of-measurement (type "teaspoons in a gallon," for example, or "centimeters in a foot."), or type in a flight number like "United 22" for a link to a map of that flight's progress in the air.

Basecamp Preview: File Uploading

Basecamp's most requested feature, File Uploading, will be introduced next week. We've posted a note about it over on the Everything Basecamp support site (including a visual sneak peek of the "attach file(s) to a message" interface).

An exercise in clarity: Hero

Explain a hero of yours in 10 words or less (their name is not included in the word count).

"Poke" that link

Wow... I was conducting a customer interview for a business-to-business office supplies extranet project we're working on, and instead of saying "click" when referring to a link or button, she consistently said "poke." I just love that. Poke that link.

Big Frustrations ordering the Mini iPod

I love you Apple, but sometimes you just get under my skin. Take the example of the ordering process for your stellar iPod Mini. I want one now, but I find the process to get one from your site just a little frustrating. Yeah, I'll plod through it, cause the prize is worth the effort, but why push me through all these steps just to add it to my cart? It's 5 total steps before I can even begin the checkout process. And then, after all that, I find out that I can't even have one for up to 3 weeks...

Now, I understand the business case for sending me through all these sales steps, and I do appreciate the simplicity of the UI itself (I don't have to check radio buttons or do any configuration to let you know if I want to engrave or buy a gift certificate or need anything else), but it really is frustrating to get all excited about something (and spend the time entering the engraving and filling out the gift certificate and adding other accessories to my order) only to find out that I'm going to have to wait even longer to hear the music.

How about some open and honest disclosure up front letting me know the estimated ship dates? Maybe I'll just run out and get one at the local Apple Store instead. You get the money now, I get the iPod Mini now, everyone's happy. Instead, I'm a little pissed off.

Active Help: Advice That Melts Away

"Did you know..." tips provide helpful suggestions for site visitors but there's a catch: There's nowhere good to put 'em. Stick them in your help or FAQ section and most visitors will never see them. On the other hand, if you put them inline on your pages they take up valuable real estate and get in the way of expert visitors.

But what if you can actually track your visitors? Then you can discern between newbies and experts and provide them with the relative level of advice they need. This sort of "active help" is a great way to steer people who are new to your site without getting in the way of your veterans.

The active help at Basecamp has been one of the tool's most popular design features. When you first start a project, an active help box appears at the bottom of each page. It's titled "Things you can do that you haven't done yet" and it provides links and advice on how to use key features like posting messages, adding milestones, and giving clients access to your site. The kicker is that as soon as you demonstrate you know how to use a feature, the active help relating to it disappears so you don't have to worry about being clubbed over the head with information you already know. Plus, you can always get rid of the active help at anytime by simply clicking on the "Hide this help box" link.

Here's a look at an active help box (in the red box) in the context of a page at Basecamp:

See Larger Version of Active Help Box

So once you add a milestone, for example, the text that advises you how to add a milestone is removed from the active help area. It's help that melts away once you no longer need it.

37signals Workshop Exploratory Committee

Pretty soon we'll be announcing our summer workshop series (including two with our friends at Adaptive Path and one with our officemates at Coudal Partners).

We're trying to gauge interest in a new full-day session called "The Building of Basecamp." The session would basically be a complete case study of the building of a real-world web app (Basecamp). Topics covered would include key back-end/engineering decisions, interface design techniques and concepts, functionality choices and prioritization, usability considerations, information architecture/structure, working remotely (we're in Chicago and the lead developer is in Copenhagen Denmark), and marketing strategies. We'll be talking about what worked, what didn't, and what ongoing changes we're making. If there's enough interest, we'll also be bringing in David Heinemeier Hansson, Basecamp's lead developer from Copenhagen to cover the key technical aspects of the project (including the decisions to go with Ruby over PHP, Python, etc.).

We'd price the full day session between $295 and $495 and we'd probably hold it in late July. If you think this might be something you'd be interested in attending, please email us or post a comment here. Thanks.

Kevin Smith on Dogma vs. Passion

Kevin Smith, director of Clerks, Dogma, and now Jersey Girl, on the hub bub over "The Passion of the Christ." (NY Times)

I haven't seen it yet. I think it's funny, though, that people bring it up and ask me, "What do you think of the controversy?" I'm like, "What controversy?" The dude made a movie about Jesus in a country that's largely Christian a very traditional movie and it's made over $200 million in two weeks. There ain't no controversy, people. That's a hit. They took one or two Jewish leaders in the beginning and said, "This may be construed as anti-Semitic," and then spun it into a must-see movie for hard-core Christians. You've got to go see it if you love Jesus. I wish to God I had thought to do that when I was making "Dogma."

Ruby on Rails to Basecamp

The use of Ruby and Rails in developing Basecamp seems to have sparked interested in both language and framework. So if you want to learn more about Ruby, I've compiled a Getting Started list of references. If you want to know more about the Rails framework, have a look at the overview presentation.

Scott Heiferman in the top 20

Congrats to Meetup's Scott Heiferman for working his way into Wired's Top 20 alongside people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne. You deserve it.

An exercise in clarity: Airplane

Explain an airplane in 10 words or less to someone who was alive in 1776.

GreenCine.com: Now THAT'S great customer service

So, late last year I signed up for GreenCine (a rent DVDs by mail service). I enjoyed it, but really didn't need it any more. So, I cancelled my account in January. Or at least I thought I did.

Today I got this email:

I was going over your GreenCine account and noticed you haven't been usingour servicesince January 17th. Are you still interested in maintaining your account. You're still being billed for our service. If not, I'll go ahead and close out your account for you. I'll also refund you for the charges that went through on 1/24 and 2/24.

Now that's great service. Not only did they want to know what was up, but they offered to refund my monthly fee for the months I haven't been using the service. Well done. Consider GreenCine a great alternative to Netflix (they have a much better selection of indie films and documentaries than Netflix too).

Flexitarian

Are you a flexitarian?

Catcher in the Rye Cover

The power of undesign. Michael Bierut on the cover of "Catcher in the Rye."

But for me, the maroon cover of Catcher has a special place. Blank, enigmatic, vaguely dangerous, it was the perfect tabula rasa upon which I could project all my adolescent loneliness, insecurity, anger and sentimentality.

Interesting note that he mentions: Rumor has it that Salinger so hated the early illustrations used that he insisted the future covers of all his books be type-only.

Web design going in the wrong direction?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed SxSW. Learned a lot, met a lot, drank a lot. It was a good time. But, the more I reflect on it, the more I worry about what's going on in the web/interface design field.

There's way too much talk about CSS and XHTML and Standards and Accessibility and not enough talk about people. CSS and Standards Compliant Code are just tools — you have to know what to build with these tools. Great, I'm glad your UI doesn't use tables. So what? Who cares if it still doesn't let people achieve their goals. Web standards are great, but people's own standards include getting things done (and that's still too hard to do online).

UI designers are making the same old fundamental "forgetting about the human being on the other side" mistakes — except this time their code looks better. Humans — not code validators — use interfaces.

There needs to be more talk about people and goals and scenarios and tasks and clear communication and clear function. More talk about what it's like to be a human clicking and pointing and struggling to make sense of all this "stuff" that web sites think we need to know and interfaces think we need to do. Jeff Veen did a nice job covering some of these concepts in his talk about mental models and user experience, and I'd like to think I introduced new and different ways to approach common UI quandaries with my presentation, but I left the conference looking for more. And not necessarily more presentations, but more conversation in the hallways. All I could hear was CSS CSS CSS.

Shouldn't sites be getting smaller not bigger? How come everyone keeps wanting to add new sections and new pages when the ones they already have aren't being read or looked at? It's not that you don't have enough content or features, it's that what you do have isn't making sense to the humans it's intended for. Sure, your CMS tool can help you manage up to 1,000,000 pages, and your search engine can scour them in less than 1 second, and you can pick from 100 templates and add a new section to your site in seconds, but how does all of this affect Bob or Susan down the street who are trying to look something up before the pasta water boils over?

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. Maybe people are talking about it and I can't hear them. Or maybe I'm right. Or wrong. Or rambling about questions that can't be answered. I don't know. I just get a sense that this industry is getting too technical and focusing on the wrong things. I just wanted to write this down. I'll do more writing about it shortly, but I thought it might be a good time to start a conversation. Spread this far and wide and post your comments here.

Back from SxSW 2004

Back from this year's South by Southwest. Had a great time, saw old friends, and met some others for the first time (including Michael Schmidt, Doug Bowman, The OK-Cancel guys, Dave Shea, Jason Shellen, Sarah Hatter, Anitra Pavka, Nick Bradbury, Brian Alvey (well, I'd met him before, but barely), Jay Allen, and plenty of others.

Special thanks to Hugh Forrest for finding me a last minute speaking slot and hooking up the book signing (thanks to Borders for that too). For those who are interested, you can download my "Three Little Things" presentation as a 2.5 MB PDF (although it might not make a whole lot of sense without me talking over it). Here's a nice little review of my session.

Desert Solitaire Excerpts

In Desert Solitaire (1968), Edward Abbey muses on a season in the wilderness. Some excerpts...

On clarity in the desert:

To me the desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting; I feel no temptation to sleep or to relax into occult dreams but rather an opposite effect which sharpens and heightens vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. Each stone, each plant, each grain of sand exists in and for itself with a clarity that is undimmed by any suggestion of a different realm. Claritas, integritas, veritas.

On surfaces:

For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces. In fact they alone seem to me of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind---what else is there? What else do we need.

Thanks to the SvN reader who suggested it in a thread here long ago.

The American Paradox

All This Progress Is Killing Us, Bite by Bite by Gregg Easterbrook (NY Times) argues that, in many ways, "society's success seems to be backfiring on our health or well-being."

Increasingly, Western life is afflicted by the paradoxes of progress. Material circumstances keep improving, yet our quality of life may be no better as a result - especially in those cases, like food, where enough becomes too much.

"The maximum is not the optimum," the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who died last year, liked to say. Americans are choosing the maximum, and it does not necessarily make us healthier or happier.

Relatedly, Across a Great Divide (also NY Times) provides a European perspective on the odd nature of America's multicultural yet unilaterist bent: "The result is a paradox: a fantastically tolerant and flexible society that has absorbed the whole world, yet has difficulty comprehending the world beyond its borders."

The author's view: Europeans think we're a bunch of religious kooks...

In the United States a majority of respondents in recent years told pollsters that they believed in angels, while in Europe the issue was apparently considered so preposterous that no one even asked the question.

...and see this same sense of religious infallibility in the Bush administration's policy and language.

The United States apparently cannot be wrong about anything, nor does it have to apologize to anybody. In many parts of the world people have come to believe, fairly or not, that Americans regard the life of their countrymen as infinitely more valuable than the lives of any other of the earth's inhabitants.

Meanwhile, the hottest debates here are over tits on tv and whether gays can marry. Sigh.

The 17-year report

We're closing in on another 17-year cicada cycle, where the large noisy bugs come by to keep an eye on us and report back to their masters. This one should be a doozy:

(Cicada reporting back) "So check this out. They have a ROBOT... on MARS."
(Crowd of Cicada masters) "Whooahh."

Surfing Sideways

Someone's always trying to make a horizontal layout work in order to seem fresh. The latest siting: J. Crew. But is it ever truly a good idea to make people use the bottom scrollbar instead of the right side one?

The weirdest OS X or Powerbook bug

So weird. A section of the bottom left corner of my screens (I have dual monitor set-up) doesn't respond to mouse clicks. I can mouse over and through it just fine, but if I click down there nothing happens.

Plus, it seems like the dead area is proportional to the size of the screen (it's smaller on the Powerbook's screen than on the 22" Cinema Display's screen). It's hard to measure, but it's at least a couple inches square on the big screen. Has anyone else experienced this?

A tribute to Ruby

When programmers speak of code as ugly or beautiful they reveal an appreciation of software that goes much deeper than the functionalistic appearance of their work. There are plenty of obvious and objective correlations between ugly and opaque code and defects and extendability, but the individual and psychological effects are at least equally interesting.

Whether bad code stems from duplication, verbose constructs, low coherence, or high coupling, it brings along a wide array of unwelcome feelings within the mindful programmer. Guilt (I should have done better) and fear (What if I can't do better?) are the most prominent, which in turn leads to procrastination as a short-termed escape from the unwanted feelings.

It's against this backdrop of feelings that I best explain my gratitude to Ruby. Ruby helps me avoid feelings of guilt or fear like no other programming language has in the past. The feedback loop between thought and code fulfilling those thoughts is effectively preventing impatience and uncertainty to take hold as a welcome for those other unwanted feelings.

Ruby doesn't make new things possible, but many things desirable. It also affords continous simplification and occasional breakthroughs at an for me unprecedented level. There's an immense sense of satisfaction in making less code do more on a regular sometimes even daily basis.

As a practical example, Ruby enabled me to program Basecamp in less than two man-months (which, however, doesn't map to either calendar months or the entire developing process for 37signals). That while learning the language and building a full-stack web framework (ORM-layer, controller, template system) called Rails (and soon to be released). It further allowed the system, though continous simplification and occasional breakthroughs, to adapt a wide range of new features without significantly increasing the codebase.

I owe my continued interest in programming to Ruby.

An exercise in clarity: Money

Explain money in 10 words or less.

SxSW 37signals Presentation Reminder

Reminder, I'll be presenting at SxSW in Austin, TX on Tuesday, March 16 at 11:30. Here's the presentation summary. Immediately after my presentation I'll be selling and signing copies of our new book at the Borders booth (L13, L14) in the Trade Show + Exhibition area (here's the full SxSW book signing schedule). I hope to see you there.

Family Guy

Ryan has successfully converted 37signals into a Family Guy watching office. Good news too: the series is coming back for more. It's the first time a canceled series has been revived on the strength of its DVD sales and syndication ratings. The story also mentions that Seth MacFarlane, the guy behind FG, will make his big-screen directorial debut with the upcoming "Family Union."

Amazon gets Defensive

Amazon has finally solved one of their biggest customer experience issues with Defensive Design: They now tell you exactly how much time you have to order a book if you still want it for one-day shipping. For example, this screenshot from the book detail page...

...tells me I have 20 hours and 45 minutes to order the book if I want it by Friday (which is the soonest I can get it since it's late on Wednesday afternoon).

This is great Defensive Design because they anticipate the question and answer it right on the spot. Amazon knows that if I have to leave this page to find the answer, I'm less likely to find my way back and purchase the book. For more tips on Defensive Design, check out our new book, Defensive Design for the Web.

An exercise in clarity: Microwave Oven

Explain a microwave oven in 10 words or less.

Mindboggling

First see this then see this. And here's the play-by-play.

Self-Serve Confusion

I'm so glad Andrei at Design by Fire posted a critique on self-checkout lanes at supermarkets. Whenever I go to the store, I always set aside about 5 minutes to just watch people struggle through them. It's really a great way to learn about how people interact with machines (specifically the combination of virtual and physical interfaces). Try it sometime, I promise you you'll learn something.

I've actually been meaning to put together an analysis of American Airline's horrible self-ticketing kiosks. I'm shocked at how bad the interface and experience is. However, I've been afraid to take pictures of anything at the airport lately (especially since the kiosks are located near ticket counters and baggage scanning machines).

Buddies No More

The recent Search Engine Strategies conference revealed Google and Yahoo aren't too cozy these days. WebProNewsstaff writer Garrett French says, "You could almost always count on some crackling tension between the two search giants."

The big talk at this conference was the new Yahoo paid inclusion program, which allows webmasters to pay to show up in Yahoos primary search results. At the close of Google employee Craigs presentation he declared, in a comment obviously leveled at fellow presenter Tim Mayer of Yahoo, our search results are not for sale.

Book: Now Shipping at Amazon & BN.com

Alright, our book is in the house. “Defensive Design for the Web: How To Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points” is now shipping at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

It's been a loooong process but it's great to finally see the real thing, hold it, and leaf through it. In case you've missed the previous posts about the book, we've created this page that includes a summary of the contents, testimonials, sample pages, FAQs, and a link to download a chapter.

If you prefer to buy offline, it's expected to be on bookstore shelves in another week or two. Also, it may still take a few days yet for other online retailers to start shipping it.

If you read it and like it, we'd really appreciate if you'd write a review on Amazon. Positive reviews can really help to drive sales. Also, if you spot errors or just have a comment to share, please write email@37signals.com.

Here's one last testimonial, from Mark Hurst, founder of Creative Good: "Defensive Design for the Web shows you how to create a good customer experience even when things go wrong. If you work in user experience or usability, you have to learn what's in this book."

Thanks to everyone who helped to make it happen.

Turning 30 in 30

On April 7 I turn 30. I can't decide if I really care or not (and since I don't have any choice it really doesn't matter). It's slighty weird to think I won't be "in my 20s" anymore though (and some people think I'm already over the hill). But, I love a challenge and there's always something energizing and liberating about starting over at 0 (we get, what, about 6-8 chances at a 0?). There's lots of opportunity in 0. I like what I see around the corner...

The one thing I do know is that I've changed a ton over the past 10 years. From graduating from the University of Arizona, to blowing out my knee and two reconstructive knee surgeries (and then fully recovering), to moving to San Diego (then to San Francisco then back to Chicago), to girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, to founding two companies, to buying my first house, to losing two incredible business partners, to amazing friends made and lost, to my first trip to Europe, to a better relationship with my parents (I can be difficult), to humbling experiences, to retiring Audiofile, Videofile, and Bookbin, to thinking big but never being blinded by quixotism, to finding out what I'm good and bad at, to those moments when you realize you don't know as much as you thought you did, to getting over a fear of public speaking, to making mistakes (learning from some and repeating others), to participating in writing a book, to building an influential brand from scratch, to principals and doing what I believe in, to making very difficult life/business decisions, to confidence and trust and respect, to seeing people at their best and their worst, to good timing and good luck, to opportunities I've been given that I'll never forget, to seeing places I've never seen and doing things I've never done.

All-in-all, I'm quite proud of my accomplishments in my 20s and look forward to trumping them in my 30s. Here's to always improving.

And, of course, thanks to all of you for allowing me to do what I do everyday. Signal vs. Noise has played, and continues to play, a critical role in the success of 37signals.

iPod Remote Redesign

I really enjoy my iPod, particularly on long bike rides (one earbud removed, of course). And although the scroll wheel is a work of beauty raised to near-perfection with the iPod mini, I have a complaint about the wired remote control.

If you look closely at the image above or if you have the remote at home, you'll notice that it's highly symmetrical. While beautiful, this poses two related problems for someone who is unable to see the remote itself.

By feel alone you cannot:

• Tell the difference between the Volume and the Play/Pause buttons
• Tell the difference between the Next and the Previous buttons

This is frustrating, particularly because I don't always have the chance to clip the remote control in the correct vertical position. And even if I do, clothes tend to move around -- the remote control inevitably goes askew. So here's what I propose:

• Introduce asymmetry: Migrate the Next/Previous buttons closer to the Play/Pause button.
• Add useful texture: Make the Next button convex (bulging outward) and the Previous button concave (bulging inward). Nothing too deep.
• Trust in Braille: To make the up/down sides of the Volume button easier to tell apart, add a little raised dot to the "Up" side (like the one on the "J" and "F" keys on the keyboard).

Nothing huge here -- just some small tweaks to improve the user experience for iPod users (blind and sighted).

Martha Stewart Convicted

Martha goes down on all charges. Next episode: Beautifying Your Prison Cell & and All The Wonderful Things You Can Do With Bread and Water.

Present better, by Veen

Jeffrey Veen, the man with half a face, posted Seven Steps to Better Presentations. It's full of great advice. I'd add two more bits:

8. Know your audience. You need to know who you're speaking to. Find out where they work. Find out their reason for attending. Find out what they know. Find out what they are expecting. Most people who blow presentations blow them because they aren't presenting the right material to the right people.

9. Mix it up a little.Talk about a few things, not just one super detailed thing. People get bored. When I talk, I announce up front that I'll be talking about 3 things (33% each). Of course it all depends on how much time you have, but I've found that anything longer than an hour should be split into multiple little presentations.

Follow-up: Designing a web app's "Blank Slate" state

Back in September of last year, I posted about The Challenge of Designing the "Blank Slate" which discussed the paradox of the customer deciding if they understand and enjoy the application before the app gets a chance to put its best foot forward. The problem is that most web apps shine when they are flush with data, but the customer's first impression is when the app is empty (the "blank slate").

Well, the web app I was talking about back in September was the still secret Basecamp web-based project management and client extranet tool. Now that Basecamp has launched, I wanted to share a couple of the blank slate screens with you (screenshots below).

When we designed the blank slates in Basecamp, we wanted to make sure that we provided examples — both visually and textually — of what will eventually occupy a page. We also made sure that we always provided suggestions of how to get started (since we knew that the reason someone was seeing a blank slate was because they hadn't done something yet) and never presented anyone with a dead-end. Dead-ends are UI evils.

Below you'll find two examples of Basecamp blank slate screens.

The first one is the first screen (the Projects Dashboard) someone sees after they've logged in. You'll see that it welcomes them aboard, explains what this page will eventually contain (once they start adding projects), provides an example link to a tour of the page they are on, gives them some options to "get started," provides a link to the Everything Basecamp support site, and finally provides a tech support email address should they have any questions. Here's the screen (click it to see it full size):

The second screen is the same Projects Dashboard after they've created a project. You'll see that the page now lists their first project on the left side (highlighted in yellow), explains that there hasn't been any activity in the project yet, details what they can expect to see once they start working with that project, and provides a visual example of a flushed out "what's fresh log" (with a big red "EXAMPLE" cutting through it so they don't wonder where all that data came from). Here's the screen (click it to see it full size):

If you're curious, this is what the Projects Dashboard looks like when it's full of data.

Folks who use Basecamp will also see explanatory blank slate states in the to-do, milestones, and weblog/messages sections if they haven't used those sections yet.

When building your own web app, or web apps for your clients, we hope you'll take the time to think about and design effective blank slates. They are one of the most often ignored screens, but often make or break the experience for the first time customer. If you spend all that time and money trying to gain customers you might as well make the best possible first impression. They'll appreciate it more than you realize.

Volvo unveils a car designed for the other 50%

The new Volvo YCC concept is designed for women by women which means "It's not just powerful and sporty, but also easy to park, maintain and keep clean." I love it, but here's my first critical thought: Since women are usually shorter, will they be able to reach the gullwing door to close it? Also, will they want to reach up (leaving them more exposed) to close the door?

...Every aspect of the car's design and production has been overseen by women, a first in the automotive industry. The result: A car that's designed to be nearly maintenance free, requiring an oil change only every 31,000 miles. When it's time for an engine inspection, the car sends a wireless message to a local service center, which notifies the driver.

I also like this:

You fill up the tank using a roller-ball valve opening, like many race cars have, because it's simpler and less messy than removing a gas cap.

Very smart. Kudos for Volvo for thinking differently about car design (and not just differently asthetically or technologically, but experientially). I hope this sparks a trend. In the end, everyone will benefit.

Procede

R.Bird, a veteran New York-based design shop (now that's a client list), has officially launched their new Procede method that aims to redefine the creative process by helping clients uncover more relevant and innovative possibilities. I know it sounds like marketing speak, but I've seen the results and it's really impressive (and I'm hard to impress). If you're in the New York area, and are in the market for brand/package design assistance, take them up on their one-minute challenge:

If we don't convince you in the FIRST MINUTE of our live presentation that PROCEDE produces GREATER POSSIBILITIES, we will pack up and let you get back to work.

I'm not much for formalized "step-by-step" processes, but I do believe they are on to something very unique and useful. This is not process for process' sake. You can also watch a 60 second QuickTime movie to get a better feel for the Procede process. I also hear they have a 30 minute documentary in the works.

Need a good reason to go to London

I really want to go to London again this year, but I don't have a good reason (other than just going again). Help me find a reason.