Since January, we have been experimenting with a new way of working. Two programmers and one designer form a team and take on projects in short, mostly two week, iterations. It’s been a great success so far and has resulted in a huge list of new features across all 37signals products. But after two full terms of new features, one of our teams decided to start the third term with a little spring cleaning.
The three of us had something different to bring to this term — each of us had been focusing mostly on customer support recently. Jamis and Jeff were fresh off terms in our support programmer role and I had spent the last few months working daily to help customers on our Answers forum. That gave us a unique perspective on our products. We came together having each experienced all of the little things that can be big headaches for our customers. So we spent the past two weeks fixing, polishing, re-writing, and improving the places that we’d seen the most confusion from customers first hand.
Here is some of what we were able to accomplish:
Sign up/Sign in:- Re-wrote and re-designed the sign in error states so that we could explain in context why someone’s login may not be working.
- Improved the sign in link to make it more visible when creating new product accounts.
- Added better detection and prevention of duplicate signups.
- Cleaned up and fixed various display issues with 37signals ID email notifications.
- Modernized the sign in screens using CSS instead of transparent PNG images.
- When inviting new users, detect duplicates. This warns admins that they may be trying to invite someone who is already on their account avoiding multiple sign in confusion.
- Stop trying to automatically create users on an integrated Campfire account and simplify the process—members enter chats as themselves, non-members enter as guests.
- Fixed that the responsible party pulldown for to-dos shouldn’t include people who can’t see private items
- Fixed a longstanding issue with reordering of To-do templates.
- Corrected the decimal precision of the total number of hours displayed on time pages.
- Resolved various display issues, from text formatting to icon alignment.
- Updated monospaced font styles to render more consistently and attractively across browsers and platforms.
- Updated and improved iCal and API authentication copy.
- Exposed better invoice options, such as the email address and ‘Bill to’ field on the Account tab.
- Introduced per-user iCal feed to fix a recurring time bug whenever DST changes.
- Fixed an annoying issue with editing multi-day events that could result in the start date being incorrectly set to next year.
Improving our products isn’t just about new features. Polishing, re-writing, fixing, and improving existing features can do just as much to make them better and more enjoyable to use. Many of these fixes were directly related to repeated questions or suggestions from our customers so we’ll be keeping an eye on support to measure their impact.
If you’re interested in keeping up with changes to our products as they happen, you can see them all on our 37signals change history page or follow @37changes for our Twitter feed of product updates.
Adam Wood
on 17 May 10This is great to see!
Sarah William
on 17 May 10Great article..nice to read…thanks for post….
Richard L. Burton III
on 17 May 10Very kick ass. Do you guys allow people to stop by the HQ? :D
Tommy
on 17 May 10Dito w/ Richard…I live on teh South Side of Chicago, use Basecamp and am always curious as to what your work space looks like. Not that it matters, but still curious.
DHH
on 17 May 10Richard, Tommy, we don’t have a good setup right now for people stopping by. But once we get our new office, we’ll try to get some events going for customers.
Michael Simmons
on 17 May 10Whew! Seeing all the new features lately was starting to creep me out. Thought you guys were starting to over-feature your products on us. Nice to see you go back and tighten things up.
Mark C. Webster
on 17 May 10Reminds me of the post about the US Army’s Special Forces team: a group of 12 that can then break down into smaller teams (2 of 6, 3 of 4) because of their cross-disciplinary training.
OnSIP
on 17 May 10Very cool – It’s important for software companies to pull back and focus on “spring cleaning.” This sounds like a good effort to organize that without losing momentum on other projects (on which your other teams are working).
It’s no secret that striking a balance between client requests and new features is tough. Actually, we try to juggle a few categories:
1. Tidying up backend/infrastructure (“this class is a little wonky…”) 2. Client requests ( “it would be nice if…”) 3. Marketing requests (“this would be a buzz-worthy feature..”) 4. Forward thinking features (“this is where this technology will head…”)
We balance by setting goals at the beginning of quarters – A meeting of the minds where sales, support, marketing, and engineering bring wish lists and settle on a road map. Of course, there’s always a little off-roading here and there. But, the team has the same goal – to maintain a good phone service – and so it works. @onsip
Jared White
on 17 May 10I appreciate the overview, and thanks for reminding us that, in the end, genuine customer satisfaction really is important. I’ve written about eliminating pain points for clients before (as I’m a Web designer), and when it comes to software, you have a exponentially higher number of “clients” to deal with! (I think most companies just tune out the noise altogether.)
Question: how do you deal with deciding what feedback stems from someone just not grokking how you’ve designed something, vs. deciding you really need to make improvements?
Jon Kolko
on 19 May 10Please stop adding new features, and fix the usability of your current products. Even a cursory usability test will indicate tons of issues – the issues that drive my team absolutely crazy, every day – including the writeboard requiring a password issue, the two save buttons on the edit a user page, the user losing their access rights after being moved to a different company, the inability to assign multiple owners to milestones, the two ‘add a person’ buttons on the project page, the awful formatting of message line breaks, the inability to add new notifications to a thread, and the inability to get our data out of your product so we can use an alternative. The list is endless.
JF
on 19 May 10the inability to assign multiple owners to milestones
This is a deliberate decision. We believe in making one person responsible.
and the inability to get our data out of your product so we can use an alternative
You can export your data at any time. We provide XML and HTML format:
the awful formatting of message line breaks
You’ll have to be more specific. We just launched a new message editor this week as well.
the inability to add new notifications to a thread
You can do this whenever you’d like. Edit the message (or comment or to-do) and check off additional people on the notification list. Then save.
This discussion is closed.