A few weeks ago Jamie posted a screenshot of a concept we were exploring to help someone choose the right 37signals product. It looked like this:

The idea was a series of tightly arranged conversation bubbles pointing to one of four different product icons (one for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire). Each bubble would contain a use case. “Keep track of all the hours spent during the project” would point to Basecamp, for example.

It wasn’t a final design, it was just an exploration. We liked the spirit and friendliness and essence of it, but the execution was messy. We learned that we liked the bubbles. That’s what quick explorations are for.

v2

Last week we wrapped up another exploration using the bubbles. We’re not going with this direction, but we thought it would be interesting to share the progress. Here’s what we came up with.

Instead of random bubbles tightly packed, we went with a major bubble per product and then 2 secondary bubbles on either side. The major bubble was the big picture idea of the product and the secondary bubbles were key uses or features we wanted to communicate. Note: This is not final copy — it’s good enough copy for the exploration.

We liked this, but we still felt it was a little messy and lacked focus. A lot of imagery and shapes to communicate a few things per product.

But, this design lead us to what we think is the right design. We’re keeping the bubbles but reworking them again. We hope to have the new 37signals home page redesign live within a week.

Thanks for everyone’s feedback thus far. We hope you like the behind the scenes “Design in Progress” posts.