An interesting thing happens when your customer base reaches a certain size: You cease having edge cases. I think we’ve probably been at that point for a good year now – maybe longer – but we’ve really felt it recently.

Mistakes, bugs, incompatibilities, and related issues that used to affect a handful now affect hundreds. 1% is a real number now.

This requires some organizational change. More caution, more testing, more contingency planning, more disaster planning. These are good things in one direction and frustrating things in another. Regardless, they’re real and here to stay.

It’s a healthy reminder that companies can change, policies can change, techniques can change, perspectives can change. This change can come quick or take many years, but it’s usually already happened before you really notice it. It’s your job to catch up with it. What once worked before may not work again just as what didn’t work before may work now.

Personally, I’m finding it invigorating. It’s a new challenge for us as we continue to grow—people, revenues, exposure, influence, and responsibility.

As we approach our 10th anniversary, I’m reminded of what we’ve always known to be true: simpler is better, clarity is king, complexity is often man-made, and doing the right thing is the right way to do things.

In-store good or at-home good? is a post from a while back here at SvN. Here’s an updated take on the subject…

You know what it feels like. You go to a store. You’re comparing a few different products and you’re sold on the one that sounds like it’s the best deal. It’s got the most features. It looks the coolest. The packaging is great. There’s sensational copy on the box. Everything seems great. 

But then you get it home and it doesn’t deliver. It’s not as easy to use as you thought it’d be. It has too many features you don’t need. You end up feeling like you’ve been taken. You didn’t really get what you needed. And you realize you spent too much. 

You just bought an in-store good product. That’s a product you’re more excited about at the store than you are after you’ve actually used it. 

Smart companies make the opposite: something that’s at-home good. At-home good is when you get a product home and you’re actually more impressed with it than you were at the store. You live with an at-home product and grow to like it more and more. And you tell your friends too. 

When you create an at-home good product, you may have to sacrifice a bit of in-store sizzle. A product that executes on the basics beautifully may not seem as sexy as competitors loaded with bells and whistles. Being great at a few things often doesn’t look all that flashy from afar. That’s ok. You’re aiming for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand.

This isn’t just about in-store packaging or displays. It’s true for advertising too. We’ve all seen the TV ad for some “revolutionary” gadget that will change your life. But when the actual product arrives in the mail, it turns out to be a disappointment. In-media good isn’t nearly as important as at-home good. You can’t paint over a bad experience with good advertising/marketing.

Graffiti is a problem in a lot of cities, but the tagging that annoys me most is that of American politicians. Take the Secretary of State for Illinois, Jesse White, as an example. I see his name everywhere and it’s making me crazy. He’s adorning my fucking driver’s license in a place more prominently featured than my own!

The website to deal with renewing license plates or anything driving is called “The Official Web site for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White”. His HEAD is part of the logo! That just pisses me off to no end. If I ever get the right to vote in this country, the first thing I’ll do is vote for anyone but this self-promoting clown.

Stop worrying about spray cans and start worrying about the tagging of these renegade politicians. It’s much more costly to clean up their shenanigans.

An interview with Ryan: Ryan Singer on UI design, Frontend Development, Project Management and Inspiration (ThinkVitamin.com).

As a designer, do you need to understand frontend development?

The more you understand about frontend development, the better designer you’ll be. If you are really familiar with handcoding and you understand basic HTML markup and you know how CSS selectors work then you’re really well prepared, for example, to use the fact that jQuery and Prototype both have a way to refer to pieces of your mark-up using CSS selectors even though your not using CSS.

If you’re designing web app user interfaces, then I think it’s important to get into understanding how an MVC framework works like Rails or Django. If you can understand how your templates fit in to the view, as the “V” in MVC then that’s a huge leap. You can really start doing work with programmers and you can have ideas and you can make them into reality instead of just making designs and handing them off to somebody and hoping that someone else can plug them in.

Read the full interview.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
New File Uploading features in Basecamp
We’re excited to announce a batch of improvements to File Uploads in Basecamp. Now it’s easier to attach multiple files at once, we’ve improved our progress bar to show you as each file is uploaded, and you can click thumbnails to zoom image attachments without leaving the current page. These new features make it faster and easier to attach, review and discuss files in Basecamp. Here’s a demo video to show you all the improvements.

New Basecamp feature: The Daily Digest
We’re excited to announce a great improvement to Basecamp. The new Daily Digest feature makes it easier than ever to track the progress of your projects. The Daily Digest is an email that Basecamp sends you once a day. The email tells you about any to-do items or milestones that were checked off or added in the last day. Daily Digests are per-project, so you can subscribe to the projects you really care about without being distracted by any unnecessary information. Now you’ll always know day-by-day as work is completed or new work is assigned. It’s a really powerful feature.

Timy: “An easy-to-use desktop application to fill out your Basecamp timesheet”
Timy is “an easy-to-use desktop application to fill out your Basecamp timesheet.”

I’ve always preferred sketching UIs with an as-thick-as-I-can-find Sharpie over a thin ballpoint pen or finely sharpened pencil.

Ballpoints and fine tips just don’t fill the page like a Sharpie does. Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines. When you sketch with a thin tip you tend to draw at a higher resolution and worry a bit too much about making things look good. Sharpies encourage you to ignore details early on.

If you sketch, try a thick Sharpie next time. You may find you’re better able to focus on the concept and less on the drawing. That’s a good thing.

Just about two weeks ago we launched the a redesign of the account chart in Basecamp. This is where people can upgrade or downgrade their accounts.

The goal was to increase overall upgrade conversions and encourage people who are on Basic plans or lower to upgrade to the Plus plan (our lowest priced full-feature plan).

Results

I’m glad to report our design hunches appear to have paid off. We’re only about two weeks in, so we don’t have a ton of data yet, but we can compare the 14 days since the upgrade with the 90 days prior to the upgrade.

• Average upgrades/day: up 13%
• Average Plus upgrades/day: up 33%
• Average $ value increase per upgrade: up 8%

We’re thrilled with these numbers. We’ve moved the new design to the Highrise account chart as well. We’ll watch and see if we see the same improvements with Highrise as we have with Basecamp.

It’s been several weeks since I was hired here at 37signals so I thought it might be interesting to share some of my experiences so far.

Ready, set, go!

One of the best things has been how quickly I’ve been able to jump in and start contributing. The very first project I worked on was a refresh of the Account screen in Basecamp. What started as an exercise quickly escalated to a new design that we wanted to actually put into the app. So it wasn’t long before I moved from Photoshop right into the app code to integrate the new design. This required me to build on my limited experience with Ruby on Rails, setup my computer for development, learn enough Git to be dangerous, and get a feel for application structure and conventions. None of this could have happened without the patience of my co-workers and the solid development structure/process that is in place here. Here are a few general observations:

• The 37signals community is huge! Every change is noticed — sometimes within minutes of being launched. Receiving instant feedback to your work is great (at least so far :)
• Git has been a surprisingly nice addition to my workflow. The ability to quickly switch branches and compare my version to the original has saved me countless hours
• There are new things being added to the apps constantly. It’s exciting to see all of the new features and improvements every day. It can be hard to appreciate all of this activity from outside the company, but we’re working on that
• No longer supporting Internet Explorer 6 is liberating!

In the first ten days or so I was able to design and implement a single screen redesign, get it deployed and write it all up at Signal vs. Noise. It’s pretty great to feel like you’re contributing and making a meaningful impact so quickly.

Working remotely

One of the biggest changes for me when joining the company was working 100% remotely. 37signals is based in Chicago, but half the team works outside the office — even the Chicago crew isn’t in the office every day. So it has been great to join a company that knows how to work with a widely distributed team. As you might assume, communication is the key to making the team effective and productive. Here are a few ways we stay connected:

Campfire

I have to admit that I didn’t get Campfire before I started working here. I’d been a long time user of Basecamp and Backpack, but Campfire never clicked for me despite a couple of attempts to bring it into a team workflow. What I was surprised to see is that Campfire might be the most important app that we use.

Our “All Talk” Campfire room is where the entire team gathers each day — we all stay logged-in anytime we are “at work”. Throughout the day we post questions, share screenshots, get feedback, collaborate on copy, and troubleshoot code. Campfire also talks to our apps so we get notifications when they are updated as we develop. It also serves as a way to quickly note to the team that you’re heading to lunch or will be away from the computer for a short time. But it’s not all business. We also find time to talk about the latest gadget/news/link/app/controversy and generally have a good time. Campfire is where all the typical conversations that happen in a physical office occur, but the difference here is that everyone can hear them, anyone can pay attention to what they want to, and it’s all archived so we can search through it later.

Campfire is also used along with instant messaging for the one-on-one and sidebar conversations when we want to chat, but stay out of the noise of the All Talk room. Jumping into our Small Talk room to work through a bit of code lets me work directly with a co-worker AND allows me to save a link to that conversation for future reference. This has been immeasurably helpful for me as I dig more into the tech side of our apps. Screen sharing via iChat is another great way a couple of us can quickly work together on a tricky bit of code.

In/out

Another key part of knowing and sharing what is going on with the comapny is with Backpack’s Journal screen. The journal lets everyone on the team set their current status (e.g., “Reviewing design comps”, or “Out to lunch”) and log the last few things that they have recently completed. There is no forced structure to it, we typically just update it a couple times a day as necessary. It’s a great way to get a quick snapshot of what is going on, who is working right now, and what they’re working on.

Of course we also follow project updates in Basecamp and keep an eye on external communications by checking into our Highrise account. Everything is out there for us to keep up with as we need to or want to.

Perfect balance

At 37signals I really feel more connected and current with what is going on than in any physical workplace I’ve been a part of. It is effortless to keep up with what my co-workers are doing and how what I’m doing contributes to the whole. I’m free to keep up with projects and learn new skills as they fit my interests. We collaborate how and when it makes sense, and stay away from each other when that’s the best way to work. That makes for a really effective working environment.