![Basecamp 3 home](/assets/images/projects/bc3-home.webp)
I joined Basecamp as a product designer in 2011, and stayed there for about a decade, eventually becoming head of design at the company.
At Basecamp, designers are generalists who build their own interfaces with HTML/CSS/JS in Rails. Over the years, most of my work was equal parts programming and visual design.
Here’s a (woefully incomplete) sampling of a few favorite Basecamp-the-app projects.
Basecamp 2
(2011-2015)
I joined the company in the midst of building the second version of Basecamp, which was a ground-up rewrite. I worked on a range of new UI concepts that became iconic in our subsequent products. A few of those…
The home screen
In BC2 we started using shapes as metaphors. These cards represented miniature projects, which looked like sheets of paper.
![Basecamp 2 projects](/assets/images/projects/bc2-projects.png)
People
Since projects were rectangles, people were circles, and companies were clovers. (This was long enough ago that round avatars were sort of new!)
![Basecamp 2 people](/assets/images/projects/bc2-everyone.png)
Progress
We made an alternating timeline design for the Progress view. This concept has found its way into every product since.
![Basecamp 2 progress](/assets/images/projects/bc2-progress.png)
Classic Mac Mode
My favorite BC2 project is a secret easter egg. Kind of amazed we shipped this. Type “dogcow” to unlock it.
![Basecamp 2 progress](/assets/images/projects/bc2-mac-mode.png)
Basecamp 3
(2016-2018)
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.
After 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. We got that done in about 8 weeks with just two people primarily working on it.
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.
![A cloud of boosts](/assets/images/projects/bc3-boosts.png)
I also spent a year on onboarding and conversion improvements for Basecamp 3. We ran a battery of A/B tests to verify a range of design ideas around signup and account setup.
We improved our conversion rates, but more importantly, made signup a much better experience. More on that in this post.
Design leadership
In 2019 I started managing Basecamp’s design team of 6 people. Most of the people on the team had been at the company for a long time — some for longer than me. Stepping into a leadership role like that is a humbling experience.
My role was mainly supportive and tactical: helping the team overcome challenges, advocating for them, and encouraging & moving us forward.
Some of that work involved…
- Maintaining regular 1:1s and team meetings.
- Creating new spaces for collaboration and discussion.
- Hiring new people on the team.
- Performance reviews and feedback.
- Improving documentation and definitions for how we were structured and leveled.
- Coordinating projects and giving feedback on UI, code, copywriting, etc.
- Communicating strategy and product direction.
- Implementing new processes for quality control and reactive work.
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