We’re looking for another excellent web-app UI designer to join our team.

Besides having great visual taste and talent, you must code well-structured HTML/CSS. Basic Javascript or Rails skills are a plus, but not required. Great writing skills are required.

UI designers at 37signals are always working on different things. You may be working on polishing up an existing feature in Basecamp or designing the UI for a brand new feature in Highrise. You may be revamping Backpack or fundamentally rethinking some UI in Campfire. Or maybe you’re involved in designing a brand new product (we’d like to explore two in 2011). You may be asked to come up with something no one has ever seen before.

At 37signals you’ll be working on products that people rely on to get their job done. Your work will impact millions of interactions. You’ll be working with some of the best designers, programmers, dev ops folks, and customer support people in the industry. Our team is top notch and we want you to make it even better.

Our projects are always focused on solving real problems. When the problem goes away we know the design is right. Your job, as a designer at 37signals, is to make our customers’ problems go away.

At 37signals, designers lead the teams. Each development team is made of up three people – two programmers and one designer. The designer also manages the project. In addition to designing the screens/elements, you’ll keep the team focused and make calls about what’s important. You’ll be the go-to person on the project.

We’re not looking for a certain design style, we’re looking for a certain design approach. Simplicity isn’t enough – clarity is where it’s at. You think about how people interpret the objects on the screen. What they think about, what moves them, what frustrates them, what makes them happy. You know that the right design decision can make all the difference.

You’re excited to discover a better solution, even well into a project. You don’t mind throwing something out in favor of a better idea or implementation. Projects at 37signals start with real code. Feedback from an evolving prototype guides the team. While we’re very pragmatic about code, it is important that your design/code is easy to change in response to feedback.

Lastly, you understand that copywriting is design. The words matter as much as the pixels. Great visuals with weak words are poor designs. You should care about how things are phrased as much as you care about how they look.

CHICAGO PREFERRED: Since two of our dedicated UI designers are outside of Chicago, we’d prefer if you were in Chicago to balance things out. If you think you’re perfect for the job, and not in Chicago, we still want to hear from you. We want the best we can find. If you’re the right fit, we’re open to relocation as well. We have an open desk for you in our new office.

How to apply

Send relevant work samples, and anything else that will make you stand out, to [email protected]. Include [UI DESIGN] in the subject of the email.

It doesn’t matter where you went to school, or if you even graduated. It doesn’t matter if this is your first job or your fifth. Doing great work and being driven to improve yourself and everything you touch is what matters.

If we think you may be a good fit we’ll be back in touch with step two of the application process.

Application deadline

We’ll be accepting applications for this position until December 20, 2010.

We look forward to receiving yours.

We’re excited to be adding two new people to our team. One joins our top-notch support team and the other pioneers a new position at 37signals.

On December 13th, Ann Goliak will be joining our customer support team. Ann comes to us from Rush University Medical Center here in Chicago where she’s been a reference librarian & coordinator of electronic services. Ann interviewed for a support position at 37signals once before. We’re glad she was persistent and submitted another application when a new spot opened up. Besides being smart, clever, and expert at helping people find what they’re looking for, Ann is a really sharp writer. Continuing the tradition of hiring people who go the extra mile with their job application, here’s the job application that helped her land the position.

On December 20th, Noah Lorang will be joining 37signals as our first business analyst (here’s the original job posting advertising the position). He’ll be helping us understand the data so we can better understand our customers and our business. We’re overflowing with intuition – now it’s time for a reality check. Noah comes to us from McKinsey & Company where he used his massive smarts to help their clients figure out what they didn’t know. Noah’s got an interesting background too – he has a B.S. in mechanical and biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon. Noah will be working remotely for us from his home in Pittsburgh.

Help us welcome Ann and Noah to 37signals!

This has been five years in the making. We didn’t know it at the time, but ever since we released our second pay product (Backpack) in 2005, we’ve been building up to this moment.

Today we officially release the 37signals Suite. The Suite is a bundle of our four big apps: Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire for one low price (starting at $99/month).

The core benefits

For the initial release of the 37signals Suite, we targeted three key customer requests:

1. Big savings over purchasing each app separately. Basically you get four for the price of just about two. Depending on which apps you have, and which plans you are currently on, the savings can be significant.
2. Simplified billing. Instead of getting charged separately for multiple apps, you’ll get a single charge from us on your credit card every month. You can update your credit card, upgrade your plan, downgrade your plan, or cancel all from one screen as well.
3. Unified users across all your apps. Before the Suite, if you had Basecamp and Highrise, you’d have to create the same users in multiple apps. That was a pain. The Suite shares uses across all the apps. You can create and manage all your users across all your apps from a single screen. Much easier.

The plans

The Suite launches with three plans: Starter at $99/month, Pro at $149/month, and Elite and $249/month. Each plan is well equipped and generously stocked with plenty of file storage, Basecamp projects, Highrise contacts, Backpack pages, and Campfire chatters and conference call minutes.

Abolishing the “participation tax”

Basecamp never had a user limit. From the free plan to the most expensive Max plan, you could add an unlimited number of users to your Basecamp account. However, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire followed the industry-standard “charge per seat/user” model.

We’ve never particularly liked the charge per user model. We call it the participation tax. The more people involved, the more you pay. That’s not the best way to encourage collaboration.

So with the launch of the Suite, we’ve abolished user limits on all our apps. When you upgrade to the Suite you get unlimited users on Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. Invite all your employees/collaborators to your account and get work done without having to think about cost-per-user.

How to get the Suite

Currently the 37signals Suite is only available for people who already own a Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire account. If you own any one of these apps you can upgrade to the Suite in less than 60 seconds. We will be offering the ability to sign up for the Suite from scratch down the road, but we just don’t know when yet. Note: If you don’t own one of our products yet, and you’d like to purchase the Suite, just sign up for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire and then follow the upgrade instructions above.

The team

We’ve been working on the tech and design to make this all work smoothly for many months. It may look simple from the outside, but it involved ripping out and reworking huge chunks of code in every app. We wanted to do this carefully, thoughtfully, and properly. We’re really happy with the results.

Credit for this project goes to Ryan, Jeff, Pratik, and Jamis. These guys were the core contributors to the project. Lots of other people were involved too. Jason Z and Jamie D made everything look great, and the whole sys admin crew (Taylor, Joshua, and John) made sure the team had everything they needed. Sarah, Michael, and Jason in support have been helping customers with any questions that have come up. Incredible teamwork from everyone.

The start of something great

Today the Suite saves people money, simplifies billing and account management, and unifies users across all the products. But that’s just the beginning. We have a lot of ideas for how to make the Suite even better. Stay tuned as we continue to improve.

Thanks for listening. We hope to see you on the Suite!

During Q&A at a conference I spoke at a few years back, someone asked me “What’s your take on the true value of a university education?” I shared my general opinion (summary: great socially, but not realistic enough academically) and ended with a description of a course I’d like to see taught in college. In fact, I’d like to teach it.

It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors.

Each step requires asking “What’s really important?” That’s the most important question you can ask yourself about anything. The class would really be about answering that very question at each step of the way. Whittling it all down until all that’s left is the point.

I hope to be able to teach this class one day.

We’re looking for someone who loves numbers, loves business, and loves mixing the two. This is your thing.

They might call you an analyst, a business intelligence specialist, a data scientist, an economist, or a statistician. We want to call you part of our team.

You’ll be responsible for reviewing daily sales, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. You’ll spot trends, establish and review analytics, monitor conversions, propose, implement, and measure strategies to increase revenues, grow profits, and improve margins. Using data and numbers, you’ll tell us things we didn’t know about our customers.

Our data currently comes from disparate sources including our own databases, raw usage logs, Google Analytics, and occasional qualitative surveys. You’ll be able to look at all of these sources, suggest new sources or metrics we should track, and make sense of it all. We have an abundance of intuition at 37signals. Now we want the data to back it up or prove it wrong.

You’ll be who we go to when we have a question like “How many customers that signed up 6 months ago are still around?” or “What’s the average lifetime value of a Basecamp customer who started on a free account then upgraded to a Premium plan?” or “Which upgrade paths generate the most revenue over a 24 month period?” or “What are the key drivers that encourage people to upgrade their Highrise account?” or “What sort of usage patterns lead to long-term customers?” or “Which customers are likely to cancel their account in the next 7 days?” or “In the long term would it be worth picking up 20% more free customers at the expense of 5% pay customers?”

We’ll use these answers to make decisions that will have significant impact on the business. You’ll love this stuff like we love design, programming, customer service, and product development.

You’ve done this job before and you’ve made a difference. Your insight, your reporting, and your findings have had an positive impact on someone’s bottom line. You also have a strong background in statistical analysis. We usually don’t care about schooling, but in this role it’ll be a distinct plus to see a relevant degree on the resumé.

How to apply

Email a cover letter and work experience to [email protected]. Please put “[BI]” in the the subject so we can filter these applications.

In addition, please include answers to the following three questions:

1. Explain the process of determining the value of a visitor to the basecamphq.com home page.
2. How would you figure out which industry to target for a Highrise marketing campaign?
3. How would you segment our customer base and what can we do with that information?

We look forward to hearing from you.