Today we announce the latest addition to the 37signals team: Jason Zimdars (“JZ”). Jason is a designer who lives in Oklahoma. You can find out more about him on his site.

JZ is going to be working closely with Ryan and me on app UI design while Jamie continues to kick ass on the marketing/public side of things. Mysteriously, Jason is the 7th person at 37signals to have a name that starts with J.

We’ve been talking to JZ on and off for the past year (here’s his original pitch). We considered hiring him before, but the timing and fit just wasn’t right. Now it is.

Why do we need another designer?

Even though we’re a design driven company, designers at 37signals are outnumbered about 2 to 1. Since we design interface first, this presents a problem.

There are often changes and improvements we want to make, but we don’t have enough slack on the design side to jump in and design the UI. This slows us down and makes it harder for the programmers to implement the features.

Having JZ on board will allow us to focus on improving our UIs, adding new features, polishing up existing features, and exploring new product concepts.

Why did we hire JZ?

Whenever we announce we’re hiring for a designer position, we get hundreds of responses and resumes. After evaluating people’s basic taste and skill level, we turn to other things. How do they think? What do they think about? How do they approach problems? Can they write? Do they enjoy writing? Can they express themselves concisely? How do they work when they aren’t given direction? Stuff like that.

We liked what we saw, heard, and read from JZ so we asked him to do a few paid contract projects for us. One was a quick one week exploration of variations on the Highrise Contacts screen. We gave him a week, barely any direction, and let him run with it. Jason had a full time job, so he had to squeeze in time after work. Here’s what he came up with. All things considered, we were very happy with the explorations, how he explained himself (although he’s a bit verbose — something he’ll have to work on), and the decisions he made.

After that we flew him into Chicago to meet with us for a day. We described another product we were thinking of building and asked him to mock up the UI for it based on a series of very rough sketches. Over the past few weeks he’s been working on that — also in his spare time. It was a challenging project that required a lot of problem solving. We were thrilled with what we saw. And if we decide to do this product in the next few months, you’ll see his fingerprints all over it.

So the skills were there, the thinking was there, the writing was there, the self-driven motivation was there. And to top it off, he’s a fine person and all around good guy. Character means a lot to us and it certainly helped JZ get this job.

JZ is coming to a 37signals app near you

Jason is starting in a few weeks. We have a really cool first 8 weeks for him. He’ll be exploring a variety of interface elements and screens in our existing apps in the style of the old 37express projects. Redesign one screen in one week (much like he did with the Highrise exploration). We plan on sharing many of these explorations right here on Signal vs. Noise. And hopefully we’ll be working his work into our products soon after.

So please welcome Jason Zimdars to our team! We’re pumped to have him.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
IntelliGantt: Publish and synchronize Microsoft Project with Basecamp
“You don’t have to give up the power of Microsoft Project for the simplicity and efficacy of Basecamp. IntelliGantt gives you the best of both worlds, which means a happy project manager and a happy (and productive) team.”

Highrise
View your Highrise tasks in your Backpack Calendar (or any other calendar that accepts iCal feeds)
Did you know you can view your Highrise tasks in your Backpack Calendar (or any other calendar that accepts the iCal format)? First, go to your Tasks page and scroll down to the bottom. You’ll see a link that says, “Subscribe to your iCalendar task feed.”

Campfire
Sparkflare pipes tweets and web feeds into Campfire
“We built Sparkflare because, while we use many tools every day, we live in Campfire.”

Twitter engineers use Campfire to communicate
“When [Twitter’s] software engineering teams work in multiple group chats, they use Campfire, a web-based group chat service for the Mac and iPhone.”

Getting Real
extendr.com founders: Getting Real is “a crux component to our success”
“Getting Real concepts played key roles in framing our thinking regarding web development as we built and continue to build extendr.com and other web applications. We had an idea for an optimized search results service that our friends thought was worth building. We figured if they wanted it and offered to pay us for it maybe others would too. We just had to find away to build it. Enter the conceptual framework of Getting Real and the utility of Basecamp.”

Notre Dame professor uses 37signals as example of a company that “gets” marketing
A marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business is using 37signals as a case study in his summer marketing course.

“Getting Real helped us build ProofHQ on a $15,000 budget and bootstrap to breakeven”
“We started work on ProofHQ in Jan 2007 and I bought Getting Real on 15 March 2007.  Although I had founded a tech start-up before, Getting Real summed up exactly how I wanted ProofHQ to be run.  Frankly, it was an inspiration then, and continues to be today…We launched in May 2008.  By November 2008 our revenues exceeded operating costs for the first time and we just broke even.  All this has been possible by keeping the team small, keeping our costs low and moving fast.”

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BIGOmaha was great. Definitely one of the best produced, one-day conferences I’ve been to in a while. Great venue, wonderful people, perfect lineup of speakers, and generous, accommodating hosts. Well done all around.

There were a lot of takeaways from the conference, but here are two that hit me in the gut. Both of these came from Jeffrey Kalmikoff’s presentation.

1. The goal is to apologize sincerely and be taken seriously

This was such a strong point. For all the talk about transparency and authenticity, what it really means is this: Can your company mess up bad, apologize sincerely, and be taken seriously?

Can your customers trust your apology like you’d trust a friend’s apology if they just smashed your car? Your friend would be pissed, but they’d understand and get over it. Can you say the same for your customers if you really messed up bad? Would they understand and have your back through the tough times? Would they empathize?

I thought that was a great analogy. And I think it’s such an interesting way to look at what the fancy terms like transparency and authenticity and all that really mean. Bottom line: Can someone trust your apology?

2. Accessibility means pinging back

When Jeffrey talks about accessibility he’s not talking about Section 508, he’s talking about being available to your customers, co-workers, etc.

It’s not enough to spread your email address, twitter name, IM handle, or phone number far and wide if you’re not going to respond to emails, tweets, IMs, or phone calls. Being accessible doesn’t just mean taking it all in, it means giving it all back.

There’s a lot of social broadcast going on. But it doesn’t mean as much if you’re a black hole. If you give someone a way to contact you, you need to close the loop by contacting them back. You aren’t accessible if you only receive.

Sam Maloof is “America’s most widely admired contemporary furniture craftsman.” He’s 93 and still going strong. Here’s a slideshow of his work.

He doesn’t take measurements before he starts a project.

I do not feel that it is possible to make a working drawing with all the intricate and fine details that go into a chair or stool, particularly. Many times I do not know how a certain area is to be done until I start working with a chisel, rasp, or whatever tool is needed for that particular job.

For him, functionality trumps aesthetics.

My goal is to make furniture that people can be comfortable living with. If you’re not preoccupied with making an impact with your designs, chances are something that looks good today will look good tomorrow…

I try to make my things aesthetically pleasing; but, if it isn’t functional, people will ‘oo’ and ‘aah’ over it in an exhibit but they won’t buy it. … My feeling is a chair has to be functional and comfortable for tall and short alike.

I want to share with you the process that we used to develop the Flash animation that appears on Backpack homepage. The Flash animation itself isn’t a technical or design feat. There are many more examples of that online. It is how we got there that I find pretty cool.

First steps

We had previously launched 3 successful redesigns for the Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire marketing sites. It made sense for us to approach Backpack in a similar way. Following that system: the main feature is comprised of a headline stating the big idea and to the right an image of a page within the app.

The page view I initially chose to feature was the Backpack Newsroom (above). The Newsroom shows all sorts of activity within Backpack. One glance shows that Backpack can be used by a group of people to share information throughout the company. The Newsroom is also a beautifully designed screen.

Jason, Ryan, and I discussed the design. What would the Newsroom screen communicate to someone who has never heard of Backpack before? It turns out not a whole lot. Is Backpack the Newsroom? How is this going to help a business organize clutter? The Newsroom screen is pretty, but ultimately we all agreed that Backpack was about Pages.

It takes less than you think to start. Zero dollars of investment. You can keep your day job. Just two months of nights and weekends. Then launch it. Maybe it’s not perfect yet. But get it out there.

That’s what the guys at Tapbots did. Six months ago they shipped Weightbot, an iPhone app for tracking your weight. It sold 100k copies in its first 100 days. And a newer app, Convertbot, a unit conversion app, is selling at about twice that rate.

Now they’re leaving their day jobs and giving Tapbots 100% of their energy. The plan is to keep things tight though…

Longer term we aren’t looking to get any VC funding, grow to 100s of employees or get bought out by some big corporation. We may get help with support, testing and/or marketing, but development and design is going to just be us two for the foreseeable future. We think that’s the best way to keep the quality of our applications at the level that everyone expects. Our goal is to produce about 4 applications a year. We aren’t going to shovel out crap-ware to cash-in on our names. We aren’t going to write the next Office or Filemaker. We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot’s of passion and a lot of hard work, that’s the Tapbots way.

The Tapbots way sounds like a pretty smart way.