Even in the most stuffy, old-school bureaucratic enterprises there are great people who just want to get work done. And doing so often means looking past the enterprisey systems and procedures mandated by corporate IT. Accenture is calling this phenomenon “user-determined computing”:

Today, home technology has outpaced enterprise technology, leaving employees frustrated by the inadequacy of the technology they use at work. As a result, employees are demanding more because of their ever-increasing familiarity and comfort level with technology. It’s an emerging phenomenon Accenture has called “user-determined computing.”

Right on. We salute these people for trying to be the best they can despite of the organization around them. It’s so very easy to just give up and not care when you’re being stifled by mandates written by people who care even less.

It makes us smile when we see rebel factions from all over the Fortune 500 and beyond sidestep their enterprisey environments and sign up for our products. And likewise, it makes us sad when we get cancelation notices from people who regret their need to stop using the products because corporate IT feels like they can built a better mousetrap internally. Those notices usually drip with disillusion.

In any case, it’s great to see more attention being paid to this phenomenon, even if the term coined by Accenture doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

How Obama’s speechwriters (who are under 30 btw) work with the candidate

“What I do is to sit with him for half an hour. He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That’s how we get a finished product. It’s a great way to write speeches. A lot of times, you write something, you hand it in, it gets hacked by advisers, it gets to the candidate and then it gets sent back to you. This is a much more intimate way to work.”

Customer experience case studies: Amazon, Apple, SAS, Whole Foods, and Zappos

“We now can point to case studies of major successes that explicitly and provably stem from a focus on good experience. (And they’re getting more frequent; these five case studies all popped up within the last few weeks.)”

The downside of home-office life

“For home-office workers who aren’t in regular touch with colleagues or clients, a frequent complaint — even among those who say they are distracted by other members of their households — is of isolation.”

49 simple and clean designs

“Let’s put it straight – simplicity is more complex than you probably think it is. To design a web-site in user-friendly tones, presenting all information and removing unnecessary details isn’t easy. In fact, many designers don’t manage to find the right mix between details and their presentation on the screen, which usually results in an information overkill and/or decreased usability. However, some designers do manage to find the right balance and create usable, elegant and clean web-sites with simple layouts. We’ve selected some of them.”

Q: What’s the easiest way to charge money for software?
A: Build software that helps people make (or save) money.

Spending money on software becomes a lot easier leap for customers to make if they can say, “I make money when I use this software.” Or “When I finish using this software, I get paid.” Or “This software saves me X hours a week.” (Time is money, right?)

People are willing to pay for Basecamp because it’s part of the project management and billing story (and sometimes part of the sales story too, for example: Basetwo Media or Element Fusion). People are willing to pay for Blinksale because it’s part of the invoicing story. People are willing to pay for TextExpander because it saves them X hours/week (in trial mode, the app even highlights the amount of time it saves you every week).

It’s a simple concept. But it can also be a helpful guide for where to focus efforts if you charge for software.

Investor’s Business Daily has always been one of my favorite business papers, but I stopped getting it years ago. I just didn’t want to deal with the leftovers—the stacks of paper full of yesterday’s news.

However, when I got the Kindle I was excited to see that Investor’s Business Daily was one of the available newspaper subscriptions. $5.99 a month for the electronic version was a done deal.

This morning I read an article that made me smile. I love stories about people who’ve achieved huge things against all odds. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

The piece was on Sidney Weinberg, the former Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He was Chairman for four decades in the early to mid 1900s.

Sidney wasn’t formally educated. He didn’t have an MBA. He didn’t go to college. He didn’t even graduate from high school. He was just a determined, ambitious mail room clerk who wanted to do big things.

Read the rest of his story — it’s pretty incredible.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

What GR-FX, experts at Microsoft Access and Office, likes about Basecamp
Garry Robinson and his associates at GR-FX are experts at Microsoft Access and Office development and XML file processing. They’re also Basecamp fans. Garry, who’s written a book on Access and a number of big articles for MSDN, sent us an email detailing how his team uses Basecamp.

Use Highrise cases to track internal staff
“We use our CRM software quite successfully to track our staff as well as our customers. Highrise by 37signals, has an option to create ‘cases.’ We use these ‘cases’ to keep notes on sick days, days off and any personal or performance issues that may arise. Access to these files is restricted to management who can then comment in the message threads if there are any ongoing issues.”

Basecamp one of the “best online publishing tools of 2007”
The Mequoda Daily provides free, valuable tips for publishers that want to build better websites. The site recently published its list of Best Online Publishing Tools of 2007 and Basecamp made the list.

Search Backpack from the desktop with LaunchBar
“LaunchBar is a cool utility that provides instant access to your applications, documents, and more. You can also configure it to search all of your Backpack pages. This makes it easy to find anything you’ve got in your Backpack account right from your desktop. If you’re already setup with LaunchBar, here’s how to search Backpack…”

Beanstalk: Basecamp-friendly version control for team leads
“Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, making it easy for anyone to setup, browse, track, and manage Subversion repositories. Beanstalk has built-in integration with your favorite tools such as Basecamp.”

Highrise is the #1 must-have tech tools for the wired mediator in 2008
“Every ADR practice needs an effective client relationship management (CRM) tool to track clients and projects from first contact to end of contract. The trouble is that most CRM software is overkill for a small business and the long lists of features are dizzying and overwhelming. Enter 37signals’ Highrise, a web-based client communications and tracking service. There are few bells and whistles and it does what it does very well.”

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Johni Brown asks:

Can you describe initial direction you took when developing Highrise, before you started over? How did it differ from today’s Highrise? What aspect of it were you unhappy with, and why?

The primary problem with the first version of Highrise was that we didn’t use it ourselves. It was built on fantasy requirements of what some people might need one day. That’s an incredibly hard way to build software. And it certainly isn’t our way of building software.

Here’s an early (ugly) screenshot from the initial direction. Lots of unstyled stuff, but hopefully it gives you an idea of the complexity we didn’t like.

The focus on “some people” lead us down the path of “they might also need this” and “it would probably be cool to have that”. Before we knew it, the create a new note screen had a barrage of options that needed to be set before you could post. It was too cumbersome, too slow, and surprisingly too rigid despite trying to be flexible. (The aha moment for us was contrasting the ease of getting data into Campfire vs Highrise at the time).

Getting too clever with language and permissions
We also got lost down the rabbit hole of cleverness a few times. We wanted categories for your notes that would align to natural language. I forget the specifics exactly, but it was akin to “David has completed a phone call with Jason”. Where “phone call” would be the category. But how do you figure out what the joining words would be when the category is “fax”? “David has completed a fax with Jason” doesn’t really work. We tried too hard for too long to be clever on wording when it really doesn’t matter all that much.

The second rabbit hole was permissions. Permissions is always a deep, dark dungeon that you really would rather not venture into. But some times dragons need slaying and so we did. We started out with a ridiculously flexible system that allowed you to mix and match any number of groups and people together. You could have a note visible by “Marketing, Programming, John, and Jane”. That proved to be incredibly complex on both the implementation side and the UI side. But for a long time we couldn’t let go because we were caught up chasing edge cases.

The promises that got us back on track
So when we finally realized that this wasn’t going to work, we rebooted the project with a number of promises:

1. Design for yourself, make everyone on the team want to use Highrise—not just Jason talking to journalists, but Ryan dealing with his mechanic as well
2. Not every edge case needs solving—yes, there might be a case where having both Marketing and Jane see something but not Joe, but it’s not worth the complexity of enabling that case.
3. Start using the product right away—a lot of “what ifs” and “wouldn’t it be cools” just go away when you actually start using something and discover what really matters.

As you can see, these lessons are nothing new. We’ve been preaching these ideas for a long time, but living them is so much harder. When we let the core principles of Getting Real slide, not even we could produce software worth a damn.

Got a question for us?
Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We’re happy to try to provide some insight into how we’d tackle the problem. Just email svn [at] 37signals dot com with the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks.

Van Mardian at Declutter Your Desk has sparked inspiration with a really clever way to deal with all the cables, connections and peripherals that make your desk a mess. He attached a pegboard to the underside of his desk and tied all those boxes and wires into a clean layout hidden from view. I especially like how he made the pegboard removable, so you don’t need to crawl around on your back to add or remove components. Total cost of the materials is $33.42 Canadian and around 2 hours of work. Awesome.

After 10-years in the works, the Eames House, Lounge Chair, La Chaise, Crosspatch, House of Cards, and other famous Eames designs will get your mail from point A to point B this summer. More from the Chairman of the Board of the Eames Foundation.

Jason Fried was recently interviewed on John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

We spent a fair amount of time discussing the workings of their newest offering, a CRM app known as Highrise…As is usually the case, 37Signals chose to do some of the primary CRM functions elegantly and leave the others to, well, others. It’s worth a look.

And let’s play some catchup: Here are summaries (posted by others) of a couple of Jason’s 2007 conference presentations…

2007 MIMA Summit Wrap Up mentions red flag words like need, can’t, easy, just, only, etc.

The afternoon Keynote was an eye opening look into a new way of working: silent. The guys at 37signals have found out that talking to each other is a big productivity killer. To help fix this, they have days where no one is allowed to talk. Their example was to think of it like sleeping. If you constantly get interrupted, you never get a good night sleep. Work is the same way. By being silent and only communicating via IM or email, you are more apt to get into the zone and crank out more quality work in a shorter amount of time.

Another tip was to avoid meetings as they can be toxic. Some meetings can be an hour long, but really, the meeting could be 15-20 minutes and have the same outcome. It seems people are more apt to fill the time than have shorter meetings.

I have to say, Jason had some great ideas. I’m not convinced that they’d work out for all companies, but there was one take away that I can start doing today; and that’s avoiding “red flag” words. Words such as need, can’t, easy, just, only and fast are all words that don’t come across well in communication as it means you’re making assumptions.

“We just need this one feature.” “It should be easy to just add one more thing.” “Let’s do it fast and get it done with.”

These types of statements make it appear as if the sender is assuming that the receiver’s job is simple. The receiver may feel insulted or under-appreciated. Avoiding those “red flag” words can help out communication quite a bit. I know I’m going to print them out and do my best to try and avoid them.

Jason Fried: Say No More sums up the Mossberg/Fried interview at The Business Innovation Factory.

1. Obama
2. McCain
3. Paul

That’s the design rankings of candidate sites according to the accumulated ratings of pages tagged “election” at CommandShift3 (the Hot or Not of web sites):

According to CS3’s Amit Gupta, these are cross-site rankings (i.e. most of the battles occurred between an election-tagged site and a site tagged something else) which might eliminate some of the political bias you’d expect.

Keep in mind that, like Hot or Not, these ratings measure the superficial look of the contenders, not any sort of real substance. The most functional sites probably don’t win a lot of sleek home page contests.