I know you love Basecamp, me too!
Thousands of applications are launched into the market every single day. Some are just a flash in the pan, while some turned to be a long-standing product. Living in a busy era like this, people start looking for viable tools for extra support. Project management tools can either serve to make your life easier or the other way round. Online communication and collaboration is a multifaceted process, and often involve complex functionality, which makes these apps a complicated beast. If designed poorly, your product will most likely end up in the bin.
Basecamp is one of the products that stand the test of time, now widely trusted by the industry. Let’s take a more in-depth look at its user experience to figure out what contributed to their ultimate success!
- An easy and straightforward sign-up process
2. Value proposition conveyed by a short 2-minute video
After the simple sign-up process, you’re greeted by a short and sweet video sending both the value proposition as well as a thorough walkthrough of the product. The users have chosen your product to help them solve a problem, and you need to reassure them that this is the product they are looking for. This simple act of reassurance is what sets the tone for the user’s experience.
3. Show, Don’t Tell
The feature I’m most fond of is the sample project displayed. Users can play around with the Sample Dashboard to have a good sense of how things work. It’s pre-populated with simulated content and allows the user to get the hang of the functions before putting in their real project.
Never dump a user into a dashboard without any introduction or guidance. It’s the place where most users got overwhelmed and gave up. With a sophisticated project management tool, guidance like this cannot be more helpful!
Once you have bounce things back and forth on the dashboard, you will start exploring the sub-categories. The simple animations and instructions are really helpful in terms of directing users to achieve their goals. After trying out all the functions within the page, you’re good to go!
Another interaction I noticed is that once you’ve selected on a sub-category, it displayed as a sheet on top. If you want to return to the previous page, simply click on the “Backsheet” beneath.
When we’re working on important content or data, the last thing we want to do is to click on the “back button ←,” as we’re afraid that the data might disappear.
Users learn better by doing than reading instructions, so engaging them to interact with the core process serves as a more effective way!
4. People love Happy Camper!
Basecamp makes full use of its mascot “Happy Camper”. This cute smiley figure speaks in a conversational tone to grab the user’s attention and walk them through the whole onboarding process. Good copywriting is vital in communicating with new users; no one is actually willing to read a thick manual. You need to know who your users are, how your users talk and how they are most likely to respond and felt a sense of engagement. In this case, Happy Camper talk to users like friends, not robots!
Happy Camper is exactly the reason why Basecamp is set apart from the competitors positively and more memorably. We all like seeing it smiling back at us on the home screen!
5. Work Can Wait
Yes, work can definitely wait.
It’s a good idea to have customizable product features, especially when it comes to notifications. We are receiving so many “beeps” and “buzz” during the day, that only get us distracted, and worse more, having a hard time getting back to what we were doing. If you’ve noticed, there’s a growing expectation of people “being always available” all the time. To maximize user productivity and goals achievement in this case (Basecamp’s value proposition), it’s better to share the control for notification contents with users.
Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, believed that toolmakers should build tools that help draw a line between work and life, so here comes — Work Can Wait.
You can also turn on Focus Mode anytime when you need to hyperfocus on your task at hand. An extremely user-friendly feature, right? You always have the freedom to turn it off or check in to see if there’s any urgent project going on, but it’s essential to encourage Focus Mode and Work Can Wait rather than having users default at 24/7/365 no matter what.
It’s as simple as it seems when you go through the process in an article, but it’s all the tiny but crucial details that build upon each other that create a holistic user experience!
—
I’m a UX Designer in progress, currently learning and collecting every piece of knowledge I can to have more insights into this attracting field. Please don’t hesitate to leave your precious feedback! You can also find me on LinkedIn!
