Stepping into a leadership role like that is a humbling experience. Most of the people on the team had been at the company for a long time - some for longer than me. In 2019 I started managing Basecamp’s design team of 6 people. We improved our conversion rates, but more importantly, made signup a much better experience. We ran a battery of A/B tests to verify a range of design ideas around signup and account setup. I also spent a year on onboarding and conversion improvements for Basecamp 3. Boosts are short bits of text or emoji to show support for someone. My other favorite Basecamp 3 project is Boosts: a unique take on the Likes/Reactions patterns that have infiltrated just about every software platform on Earth. We got that done in about 8 weeks with just two people primarily working on it. I helped prototype several early ideas for Basecamp 3 before it existed, but I wasn’t involved during its initial development period, because I stayed behind working on Basecamp 2.Īfter launch, I showed up fashionably late, and helped build the Home screen, then shored up the entire UI with a cohesive visual refresh of the many dozens of screens in the app. My favorite BC2 project is a secret easter egg. This concept has found its way into every product since. We made an alternating timeline design for the Progress view. (This was long enough ago that round avatars were sort of new!) Progress Since projects were rectangles, people were circles, and companies were clovers. These cards represented miniature projects, which looked like sheets of paper. In BC2 we started using shapes as metaphors. I worked on a range of new UI concepts that became iconic in our subsequent products. I joined the company in the midst of building the second version of Basecamp, which was a ground-up rewrite. Here’s a (woefully incomplete) sampling of a few favorite Basecamp-the-app projects. Over the years, most of my work was equal parts programming and visual design. I joined Basecamp as a product designer in 2011, and stayed there for about a decade, eventually becoming head of design at the company.Īt Basecamp, designers are generalists who build their own interfaces with HTML/CSS/JS in Rails.
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